Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Cole's Open City brought him international attention, but this novel, first published in Nigeria and now currently being republished in the U.S. and the U.K., was actually his first. Set in contemporary Lagos, Nigeria, the novel follows a nameless narrator's visit to his homeland after a lengthy stay in the United States. Estranged from his mother and unemotional about his father's death, the protagonist seeks his humanity and redemption in art. Cole's crisp language captures how Lagos-the home of numerous Internet scams and frequent power cuts-possesses a violence that both disgusts his protagonist and fascinates him. With journalism-like objectivity, Cole by way of his narrator details a Nigeria that is violent and corrupt, but also multi-cultural and alive. This pared-down writing style comes at the cost of character development. (For example, the narrator's training as a psychiatrist is never really explored.) As a result, the novel reads more like a beautiful work of creative nonfiction. The structure is loose, a collection of observances of daily life in Lagos in which Cole presents the complexities of culture and poverty. In addition, Cole sprinkles dramatic black-and-white photos throughout the book, but it's his willingness to explore so many uncomfortable paradoxes that sears this narrative into our brains. Agent: Andrew Wylie, The Wylie Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
After living in America for 15 years, a Nigerian writer returns to his homeland. Reunited with a beloved aunt, with whom he stays, he reconnects with a boyhood friend, now a struggling doctor, and visits the woman who was his first love, now married with a daughter, as he contemplates staying in Lagos. But he is struck by the omnipresent corruption, as officials at all levels, including police and soldiers, supplement often meager wages with bribes. He sees thieving area boys all around, Internet-scamming yahoo yahoo in cyber cafes, a jazz shop practicing piracy, and a national museum gone to ruin, its artifacts ill-maintained and its historical presentations inaccurate. Yet in addition to scoring high in corruption, Nigeria's claim to fame is that it is the most religious country in the world and its people the happiest. This novella, a revised version of the first book written by Nigerian Cole, author of the acclaimed Open City (2011), is a scathing but loving look at his native land in measured, polished prose.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TEJU COLE'S "OPEN CITY" was one of the most acclaimed debut novels of recent years. The story of a young African wandering the streets of New York City struck out into new territory for what might be termed immigrant fiction. We have become accustomed to a certain sort of narrative about people who come to the metropolis from the periphery. Whether set in New York, London or elsewhere, such fictions tend to present stories of striving and self-invention. We see the new immigrant struggling to make a life in an unfriendly or even hostile environment, overwhelmed by the novelty of sights and sounds, anxious about holding on to culture and tradition, filled with wonder at first-world wealth and consumption. By contrast, Cole's narrator in "Open City" is a self-assured young cosmopolitan, an educated professional who does not ask permission to explore, describe and pass judgment. His breadth of cultural reference is not limited to the traditions of West Africa. He is a lover of Mahler and Modernist photography. He reads Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. The nameless narrator of Cole's "Every Day Is for the Thief" shares so much with Julius, the flâneur of "Open City," that this crisp, affecting novella (originally published in Nigeria in 2007) often feels like an extension of the novel. He is returning to Lagos after 15 years in New York, hoping to reconnect with the city of his youth. Yet he finds that America has changed him in unpredictable ways. "I have," he writes, "taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy - certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process - and in that sense I have returned a stranger." He is shocked by the rampant corruption, which manifests itself from the moment he applies to have his passport renewed at the Nigerian consulate in New York, and frightened by the ever-present threat of violence. He meets family and old friends, visits markets and museums and Internet cafes, trying to gauge whether he could return to Lagos permanently. He has literary ambitions, and at times he seems to view the city with an eye as cold and exoticizing as any colonial traveler. Witnessing a fight, he thinks: "Well, this is wonderful. ... Life hangs out here." The "literary texture, of lives full of unpredictable narrative, is," he explains, "what appeals." He visits the site of a terrible lynching, in which a mob set fire to an 11-year-old suspected thief and, though he has arrived six weeks after the event, provides an eyewitness description, luxuriating in the image of the boy's beaten body ("like a dark sapling whipped about in the wind"), the way the petrol beads in the victim's hair just before he is set alight. He acknowledges that there is a "romantic aspect" to his response to Lagos, and falls into fantasizing about a life devoted to writing, complete with "the unwavering support of a partner, and a confidence in his own gifts," a set of arrangements he discovers would be very difficult to make amid the noise and bustle of the city, "the smell of diesel lacing the air, and the wail of a trio of power-generating engines mixing with the loud singing from the churches in the middle distance. Writing is difficult, reading impossible." As an observer of this teeming megalopolis, Cole's narrator is the opposite of the cultural critics and architects who, following Rem Koolhaas, have announced their intention to "learn from Lagos," heralding the skillful improvisations of its slum-dwellers, its chaotic, unplanned urbanism. Something of a Naipaulesque scold, he wants a Nigeria that is cleaned up, that works better, one in which the art and music he loves are respected and available to all. He takes "an irrational pride" in discovering the existence of a music conservatory. At the National Museum, he is depressed by the poor quality of the artifacts on display and the evidence of recent plunder. By contrast, he notes, "My recent experience of Nigerian art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York was excellent." Riding in a danfo (bus), he enjoys the sensory overload of the city streets, but it's spotting a woman reading a book by Michael Ondaatje that, he says, "makes my heart leap up into my mouth and thrash about like a catfish in a bucket." Lamenting the reading tastes of average Nigerians, which apparently run to tabloids and romantic potboilers, he declares, pompously, that he "could hardly be more surprised had she started singing a tune from 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn.'" The high-cultural tastes that, in "Open City," served to signal Julius's ability to take possession of New York, are here a mark of estrangement from Lagos. From the narrator's gait and manner, the market vendors know he is not (or no longer) local. Oyinbo, they call after him. "White man." He wrestles with the idea of moving back to Nigeria, not because of any emotional connection to his remaining family or unforced love of the place, but because there are "a million untold stories" that are his to possess if he pays the price in noise, discomfort and danger. But he decides, "I love my own tranquillity too much to muck about in other people's troubles." He is reduced to blasting out John Coltrane over the din of generators, fighting the city with modern jazz. Taking his cues from W. G. Sebald, John Berger and Bruce Chatwin, Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate, interspersing them with photographs. A less stylish writer would have become bogged down by the demands of narrative, spelling out the narrator's relationships with his family and friends in a way that "Every Day Is for the Thief" deftly avoids. Cole places his narrator in fleeting situations where the fault lines in his identity are most likely to crack open. The fragility of his persona, the brittle self he has fashioned from Mahler and Coltrane and Tomas Transtromer, is exposed in a short but devastating scene in which he meets a young law clerk who tries to cement a friendship, telling him that he has "always heard about people who went over there, you know, to America" and hopes to have the chance to go there himself. The narrator is reminded firstly (and cruelly) of Leonard Bast, the aspirational clerk in "Howards End," and then, "painfully" of himself and the times when he had "been someone else's Leonard Bast." He promises to meet the man again, a promise he knows he will not keep, and watches him disappear into "the great mass of the deserving." For this displaced member of the Nigerian elite, Lagos is the opposite of an open city. His decision to leave, to make himself a cosmopolitan, in other words to have aerials instead of roots, has closed it off definitively. The narrator finds that America has changed him in unpredictable ways. HARI KUNZRU'S latest novel is "Gods Without Men."
Library Journal Review
When a young Nigerian man from New York visits family in Lagos, he is confronted with a city different from the one he remembers from 15 years earlier. Told in a series of short scenes, the young man's journey is chronicled from the infuriating Nigerian consulate in New York City to the multitude of people he encounters in Lagos and finally his journey back to America. In poetic language, the narrator describes the energy of Lagos, including bribing police officers, cheating gas station attendants, children waiting in line for precious water, riding a motor bike taxi through dangerous streets, and enduring the noise of generators and the stiflingly humid heat. During his visit, the young man finds that he has changed as much as Lagos. The vignettes are interesting, amusing, frightening, and strange in turns. Peter Jay Fernandez communicates the lassitude and heat of Lagos and its inhabitants as well as the frustration of the main character with his new view of the world. VERDICT A languorous but engaging listen. Recommended to fans of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Terry Ann Lawler, Phoenix P.L. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
One Iwake up late the morning I'm meant to go to the consulate. As I gather my documents just before setting out, I call the hospital to remind them I won't be in until the afternoon. Then I enter the subway and make my way over to Second Avenue and, without much trouble, find the consulate. It occupies several floors of a skyscraper. A windowless room on the eighth floor serves as the section for consular services. Most of the people there on the Monday morning of my visit are Nigerians, almost all of them middle-aged. The men are bald, the women elaborately coiffed, and there are twice as many men as there are women. But there are also unexpected faces: a tall Italian-looking man, a girl of East Asian origin, other Africans. Each person takes a number from a red machine as they enter the dingy room. The carpet is dirty, of the indeterminate color shared by all carpets in public places. A wall-mounted television plays a news program through a haze of static. The news continues for a short while, then there is a broadcast of a football match between Enyimba and a Tunisian club. The people in the room fill out forms. There are as many blue American passports in sight as green Nigerian ones. Most of the people can be set into one of three categories: new citizens of the United States, dual citizens of the United States and Nigeria, and citizens of Nigeria who are taking their American children home for the first time. I am one of the dual citizens, and I am there to have a new Nigerian passport issued. My number is called after twenty minutes. Approaching the window with my forms, I make the same supplicant gesture I have observed in others. The brusque young man seated behind the glass asks if I have the money order. No, I don't, I say. I had hoped cash would be acceptable. He points to a sign pasted on the glass: "No cash please, money orders only." He has a name tag on. The fee for a new passport is eighty-five dollars, as indicated on the website of the consulate, but it hadn't been clear that they don't accept cash. I leave the building, walk to Grand Central Terminal, fifteen minutes away, stand in line, purchase a money order, and walk the fifteen minutes back. It is cold outside. On my return some forty minutes later, the waiting room is full. I take a new number, make out the money order to the consulate, and wait. A small group has gathered around the service window. One man begs audibly when he is told to come back at three to pick up his passport: --Abdul, I have a flight at five, please now. I've got to get back to Boston, please, can anything be done? There is a wheedling tone in his voice, and the feeling of desperation one senses about him isn't helped by his dowdy appearance, brown polyester sweater and brown trousers. A stressed-out man in stressed-out clothes. Abdul speaks into the microphone: --What can I do? The person who is supposed to sign it is not here. That's why I said come back at three. --Look, look, that's my ticket. Abdul, come on now, just look at it. It says five o'clock. I can't miss that flight. I just can't miss it. The man continues to plead, thrusting a piece of paper under the glass. Abdul looks at the ticket with showy reluctance and, exasperated, speaks in low tones into the microphone. --What can I do? The person is not here. Okay, please go and sit down. I'll see what can be done. But I can't promise anything. The man slinks away, and immediately several others rise from their seats and jostle in front of the window, forms in hand. --Please, I need mine quickly too. Abeg, just put it next to his. Abdul ignores them and calls out the next number in the sequence. Some continue to pace near the window. Others retake their seats. One of them, a young man with a sky-blue cap, rubs his eye repeatedly. An older man, seated a few rows ahead of me, puts his head into his hands and says out loud, to no one in particular: --This should be a time of joy. You know? Going home should be a thing of joy. Another man, sitting to my right, fills out forms for his children. He informs me that he recently had his passport reissued. I ask him how long it took. --Well, normally, it's four weeks. --Four weeks? I am traveling in less than three. The website assures applicants that passport processing takes only a week. --It should, normally. But it doesn't. Or I should say, it does, but only if you pay the fee for "expediting" it. That's a fifty-five-dollar money order. --There's nothing about that on the website. --Of course not. But that's what I did, what I had to do. And I got mine in a week. Of course, the expediting fee is unofficial. They are crooks, you see, these people. They take the money order, which they don't give you a receipt for, and they deposit it in the account and they take out cash from the account. That's for their own pockets. He makes a swift pulling motion with his hands, like someone opening a drawer. It is what I have dreaded: a direct run-in with graft. I have mentally rehearsed a reaction for a possible encounter with such corruption at the airport in Lagos. But to walk in off a New York street and face a brazen demand for a bribe: that is a shock I am ill-prepared for. --Well, I'll insist on a receipt. --Hey, hey, young guy, why trouble yourself? They'll take your money anyway, and they'll punish you by delaying your passport. Is that what you want? Aren't you more interested in getting your passport than in trying to prove a point? Yes, but isn't it this casual complicity that has sunk our country so deep into its woes? The question, unspoken, hangs in the air between me and my interlocutor. It isn't until past eleven that my number is finally called. The story is exactly as he has put it to me. There is an expediting fee of fifty-five dollars in addition to the actual eighty-five dollars that the passport costs. The payment has to be in two separate money orders. I leave the building for the second time that morning, to go and buy another money order. I walk quickly, and am exhausted by the time I return at a quarter to twelve, fifteen minutes before the closing of the window. This time, I don't take a number. I barge my way to the window and submit my form with the required fees. Abdul tells me to pick my passport up in a week. He gives me a receipt only for the original fee. I take it mutely, fold it up, and put it in my pocket. On my way out, next to the elevators, there's a partially torn sign that reads: "Help us fight corruption. If any employee of the Consulate asks you for a bribe or tip, please let us know." There is no number or email address appended to the note. In other words, I can inform the consulate only through Abdul or one of his colleagues. And it's unlikely that they are the only ones on the take. Perhaps thirty or thirty-five dollars of the "expediting fee" is going to someone over Abdul's head. I catch the look on Abdul's face as I exit the room. He is absorbed in assisting other applicants. It is a farce, given a sophisticated--"no cash please"--sheen. Two It is early evening when the aircraft approaches the low settlements outside the city. It drops gently and by degrees toward the earth, as if progressing down an unseen flight of stairs. The airport looks sullen from the tarmac. It is named for a dead general, and is all that is worst about the architecture of the seventies. With its shoddy white paint and endless rows of small windows, the main building resembles a low-rent tenement. The Air France Airbus touches down and glides onto the tarmac. Relief enters the holds and cabin with the inward-rushing air. Some of my fellow passengers break into applause. Soon, we are trooping out of the craft. A woman weighed down with bags tries to barge through the aisle. "Wait for me," she cries out to her travel companion, loud enough for everyone to hear, "I'm coming." And I, too, experience the ecstasy of arrival, the irrational sense that all will now be well. Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud. Disembarkation, passport control, and baggage claim eat up more than an hour of our time. The sky outside fills with shadows. One man argues with a listless customs official about the inefficiency. --This is an international airport. Things should be better run. Is this the impression visitors should have of our nation? The official shrugs, and says that people like him should return home and make it better. While we wait for the luggage machine to disgorge the bags, a white man next to me makes small talk. He has a brogue, and I ask if he is Scottish. "Aye," he says, and he informs me that he works on the rigs. --Got drunk in Paris last night, and got robbed. Firkin' frogs lifted me credit card. But the Champs-Élysées was something! Aye, pissed out me mind. Skunk drunk. He grins. His teeth are studded with metal. He wears an earring and sports a ginger-tinged five-o'clock shadow. He is not Europe's finest, but he'll earn well here. --Won't get a flight to Port Harcourt till tomorrow. Staying at the Sheraton tonight. That's where the air hostesses stay, if you get me drift. I nod. My bags finally arrive, damp and streaked with dirt. I lift them onto a cart. On the way out, an official in mufti motions me to stop. He is seated to the side of the door, and doesn't really appear to have any actual function. He's just there. He asks if I am a student. Well, yes, sort of. I figure the lie will speed things along. --Eh ehn, I thought so. You have that student look. And where do you study? NYU, I say, the answer that would have been correct three years ago. He nods. --Well, in New York, they spend dollars. You know, dollars. A meaningless silence passes between us. Then, sotto voce, and in Yoruba, his demand: --Ki le mu wa fun wa? What have you brought for me for Christmas? Because, you know, they spend dollars in New York. I have brought only resolve. I ignore him and roll my bags out to where Aunty Folake and her driver wait for me. When we unlock from our embrace, there are tears in her eyes. A scene out of the prodigal son. She hugs me again and laughs heartily. --You haven't changed at all! How is that possible? Outside, the airport looks finer, more regal than it did on approach. The entrances are clogged with passengers' relatives and, in far greater number, touts, hustlers, and all sorts of people who are there because they have nowhere else to be. Three on the way home from the airport, at the roundabout of Ikeja bus stop, where the late afternoon rush makes the traffic snarl, we come to a complete standstill. Not more than twenty yards away from us, under the overpass, two policemen bicker. "Go away," one yells at his partner. "Why you always dey stand here? Why you no go stand that side?" He points to the far side of the roundabout. For a moment, it seems as if the other officer sees the sense in the suggestion, but he is slow about carrying it out because the disagreement has by now attracted stares from pedestrians. He is reluctant to lose face. Both men are slim and dark, in gray-black uniforms, with machine guns slung over their shoulders. They stand confused and silent like a pair of actors who have forgotten their lines. A crowd of commuters gawks at them from a safe distance. Aunty Folake explains what is going on. Policemen routinely stop drivers of commercial vehicles at this spot to demand a bribe. The officer being told off has drifted too close to his colleague's domain. Such clustering is bad for business: drivers get angry if they are charged twice. All this takes place under a billboard that reads "Corruption Is Illegal: Do Not Give or Accept Bribes." And how much of the government's money, I wonder, was siphoned off by the contractor who landed the contract for those billboards? It is one thing to be told of the "informal economy" of Lagos, and quite another to see it in action. It puts pressure on everybody. Some fifteen minutes before we reached Ikeja bus stop, we had passed a toll gate on Airport Road. It, too, was in the shadow of a large billboard condemning corrupt practices and urging citizens to improve the country. The toll at the booth was set at two hundred naira: this was advertised and understood. However, enterprising drivers, such as ours, know that they can get through the toll gate if they pay just half of that. The catch is that the hundred naira they pay goes straight into the collector's purse. "Two hundred you get ticket stub," our driver says, "one hundred you get no ticket. What do I need ticket for? I don't need ticket!" And in this way, thousands of cars over the course of a day would pay the toll at the informal rate, lining the pockets of the collectors and their superiors. The demand from the immigration officer, the Ikeja police, the toll booth story: I encounter three clear instances of official corruption within forty-five minutes of leaving the airport. Even before I get home that night, though, I see other ways of thinking about these exchanges of money. We stop at Ogba to buy bread. Ogba is some way past Ikeja, at the end of Agidingbi Road. On the way into the shop a doorman salutes us and holds the door open. When we leave the building a few minutes later, he follows us for twenty yards as we move toward the car, and asks for a tip. It is not a demand: it is soft. He does it with the gentleness of someone explaining something to a child. Excerpted from Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.