Teju Cole Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.

  Teju Cole

  Book, Voice, Sound

  Teju Cole (2011). “Open City: A Novel”, p.10, Random House

• It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about a new kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted. It doesn't celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now.

  Teju Cole

  Book, Reading, Reality

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don't mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects - maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books - and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don't think it's as simple as literary inclusiveness.

  Teju Cole

  Art, Book, Mean

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.

  Teju Cole

  Book, Smartphones, Cities

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places.

  Teju Cole

  Book, Cities, Feelings

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• It is a work of psychogeography, albeit in a less explicit sense than Iain Sinclair's or Will Self's. It had to be fiction though, because I needed that freedom of including whatever belonged, and cutting out whatever didn't. The main fiction in it was matching Julius' generous and self-concealing character to New York's generous and self-concealing character. I think this also adds to my answer about New York's personality in the book.

  Teju Cole

  New York, Book, Character

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.

  Teju Cole

  Grateful, Book, Speech

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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