Teju Cole

Earlier in this still toddling year, there was a poll on Goodreads about the most pretentious book to be seen carrying . The leaders in the straw poll were Ulysses and the Arcades Project. I happened to be reading and finishing Ulysses then and I pondered the implications of such. The realization then swept over me how queer, in both senses, it is to carry a book in Southern Indiana. I am not sure those way from here can conceive of this properly, the suspicion cast upon bound pages not Biblical in utility.

I finished Open City by Teju Cole earlier today. There isn't sufficient hyperbole for the towering achievement. As to the press, certainly the NYTBR (which brought it to my attention) has found a common spirit with that W.G. Sebald, I also see Mathias Enard's Zone as a cousin to this urban peripatetic resolving our troubled times as its only agenda.