My focus on literature in translation means that I rarely read English-language fiction, but there is the odd exception. My last-minute decision to attend an event at the Melbourne Writers Festival a while back led me to make one of those exceptions, as I really enjoyed the way American writer Teju Cole talked about the future of the novel in his keynote address (and the ensuing discussion). Of course, it's a little risky to read a novel because you like the person, but don't worry - the book certainly lived up to the good impression the writer made on me...
*****
Open City probably needs little introduction; Cole's first novel has been a worldwide success, winning a string of awards. It centres on Julius, a Nigerian-born Psychology resident working and walking his way through the New York winter. Having recently broken up with his girlfriend, he spends much of his time outside work alone, listening to classical music, reading good books and pounding the pavements of his adopted hometown.
Julius enjoys his walks, which allow him to process, and escape from, the mental rigours of his daily work. He's a man who needs solitude, and even when he does catch up with friends, there's a sense of detachment, a feeling that while he is present in body, the mind is still roaming the streets of New York. A short trip to Brussels, a vain, half-hearted attempt to reconnect with a family member, is a short distraction, but it proves to be in vain. Julius is a successful, well-educated man, one who you'd expect to be happy, and the reader gradually begins to wonder if his detachment has a cause...
Cole's novel is a beautiful book, an elegant story of a city in four dimensions, and a haunting tale of a man who struggles to find his place in it. What strikes the reader on reading the first few chapters of the novel is the importance of the setting, and Open City, at times, comes across as a love letter to New York, a subtle ode to the big city. Within a few chapters, the adjective 'Sebaldian' came to mind, as Julius' tangential asides about the buildings he passes and the streets he walks through instantly reminded me of the style of The Rings of Saturn (as I quickly found out, this wasn't exactly a unique comparison I was making...).
What makes Cole's novel even more Sebaldian though is the way in which Julius sees beyond the current status, experiencing the past of the city as well as the present:
"Out, ahead of me, in the Hudson, there was just the faintest echo of the old whaling ships, the whales, and the generations of New Yorkers who had come here to the promenade to watch wealth or sorrow flow into the city or simply to see the light play on the water. Each one of those past moments was present now as a trace."
p.54 (Faber and Faber, 2011)
Julius' New York is not just a maze of skyscrapers and subway stations; it's a hole where the World Trade Center used to stand, which once stood on narrow streets, which had replaced markets, which in their turn had been built on land inhabited by native Americans. Most people don't notice the traces of the past that hide amongst the clamour of the present, but Julius (and perhaps Cole) feels almost more at home amongst these reminders of a distant past.
Which is not to say that the novel neglects people, individuals - far from it. Julius has many encounters with fellow citizens and travellers, and the majority of them are, like our 'hero', newcomers, immigrants, men and women who are straddling the divide between two (or more) cultures. From Professor Saito, Julius' academic mentor, to Dr. Mailotte, a Belgian surgeon Julius meets on a plane; from the man who shines his shoes to the aggressive autodidact running an Internet café (and studying) in Brussels; Cole shows that the world is full of people struggling to adapt to their own four-dimensional existence, trying to reconcile past and present.
Just as the novel deals with both the then and the now, it also discusses the global and the individual. Julius talks with the people he meets about their lives and concerns, but the bigger picture is never far from our view. One of his clients, a native American historian, writes about the conflict between her people and the conquering white settlers, and the effect history has at a personal level:
"I can't pretend it isn't about my life, she said to me once, it is my life. It's a difficult thing to live in a country which has erased your past." (p.27)
In many ways, Open City is a gloomy, pessimistic novel, with a sense of decay and entropy, leaving the reader feeling that it is not so much about progress as it it about decline. Then again, I suspect I'm beginning to read a little too much into things here...
It's not just what the book's about which makes Open City such a good read though; it's Cole's style which really makes it enjoyable. The soothing, flowing prose accompanies the reader on a thinker's tour of New York, and while you may struggle to discern a plot of any kind (especially throughout the first half), there is a gradual development of sorts. In the talk I attended, Cole mentioned the slow solace of the novel, something which helps you to slow down from the hectic pace of the digital world, and it's an idea he has definitely built his own work upon.
In fact, you suspect that there is a lot of the writer in the book, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, I wonder how he plans to follow up the success of Open City and where he wants to go from here. Will he continue with his Sebaldian mixture of descriptive narrative, or will the next book bring something completely different? I have no idea, but I'll be very keen to accompany him on his next walking tour :)
As noted in my prelude post, the decision to attend the Melbourne Writers Festival session described today was very much a last-minute one. However, being a fan of the longest form of fiction, a session entitled The Future of the Novel was always going to attract my attention :) The session was one of many around the world celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the legendary World Writers' Conference held in Edinburgh, and while this session was a little more low-key than the chaotic events in Scotland in 1962, it was still entertaining.
The session was chaired by Scottish-Kiwi academic and writer Liam McIlvanney and also featured 'transmedia creator' Christy Dena (even after briefly chatting to her, I couldn't tell you exactly what that means - my fault not hers, I assure you). The star attraction though was Teju Cole, author of the prize-winning novel Open City, and it was Cole who kicked things off with a ten-minute keynote address.
He started by explaining what he felt about the novel, focusing on works which (in the words of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky) 'elongate the perspective of human sensibility', with Cole saying that: "...excellence in the novel is not one-dimensional." After a brief summary of the history of the novel, including a comment on the retreat of English-language writing into the safe realm of consensus and prize shortlists, he moved onto his main focus, Twitter, which he described as a novel with no end, evergrowing, but with no single responsible author. Is this one form of the novel of the future?
*****
After this, the three writers sat down for a panel discussion, one which primarily focused on Twitter and other forms of social media. Cole and Dena discussed the idea of the 'perpetual present' of Twitter, whereby the 'reader' is carried along on a stream of... well, consciousness. In fact, it was suggested that Twitter may well be the end destination of the journey of writers like Joyce and Woolf towards penetrating the human psyche and exposing it to the world. Nobody was saying that this is entirely a good thing though ;)
A further idea which was explored was the effect that online exposure has on a writer and, consequently, on their work. Cole talked about readers: "finally having that conversation with the author you admire - and being disappointed", to great laughs from the audience. McIlvanney asked whether this time spent online could affect writers and eat away at their valuable writing time, but Cole was of the opinion that, for him at least, this time was productive and helped with his thought processes. He doesn't like the mindset which tries to convince him that he's wasting his time online and that he 'should' be working...
However, he does admit that the immediate nature of responses on Twitter can affect the writer and their thoughts. As he wryly noted: "All opinions are valid - until you start encountering all opinions!". It is here that the novel has a great advantage as it still offers the reader solace, in what Cole described as 'a place of perfect slowness'. This relaxation is something you may find hard to find online...
In the following Q & A session, I asked the panellists what they thought the novel would look like in thirty or forty years (mainly as I thought the discussion had wandered away from that focus at times). Dena thought that the print book would still be around, but mainly as a collectors' item, and she envisaged the future writer as a master of multiple media, print, social media and audio. Cole's initial response was of information downloaded instantly to contact lenses - and everyone would be reading something like Fifty Shades of Grey ;) Afterwards though, he said that it didn't really matter whether the print novel would survive in its current form. There would always be people with drive and talent (or, as he put it, 'forceful creativity'), and these people would always create great works of art :)
*****
This was a great session, very entertaining and informative, even if I'm not quite sure that the speakers really stuck as closely to the topic as I'd expected. While McIlvanney and Dena spoke well, their role was really to act as a foil for Cole, a very intelligent and likeable speaker who namedropped international writers (including Australian poet Les Murray) in a way guaranteed to endear him to me. While it's probably a very bad idea to read books based on how nice a writer is, I may well have to check out Open City at some point soon... (postscript: I'm about half-way through the book and enjoying it immensely.)
And that's all for today, but stay tuned for my final piece from the festival. My next post will be my report from the Andrés Neuman session; hopefully, Cole's comment about meeting authors you admire won't ring true...
