University of Cape Town lecturer Hedley Twidle reflects on a recent “literary walkabout” of Cape Town he undertook with Teju Cole for the Open Book Festival.
The celebrated Nigerian author was one of the main luminaries at the festival, and although Twidle admits he was concerned the exercise may have come across as contrived, he finds that a number of “unexpected affinities” which appeared between Cape Town and the Manhattan Island of Cole’s Open City generated “new insights” into both the novel and the Mother City.
Cole recently made the news when he compiled a short story on Twitter solely through retweets. His new novel, Every Day is for the Thief, will be published in March.
Twidle, who won the 2012 Bodley Head/FT Essay prize, has been shortlisted for the Hatchet Job of the Year award for his review of Paul Theroux’s The Last Train to Zona Verde for the New Statesman.
And so we begin our walk through the city centre, listening to passages from his novel, Open City, as well as the work of local writers. Unexpected affinities emerge between the early Cape colony and the history of Manhattan Island that Cole’s book so carefully excavates. Both were 17th-century Dutch garrisons; both became brutal slave ports. And in each, the built environment turns its back on the water that gave rise to it in the first place. In New Amsterdam, the navigable Hudson river; in Cape Town, the millions of litres of fresh water flowing off Table Mountain, still running unseen below the city centre. Sailors would fill their barrels at shoreline that has now been pushed back and paved over: “Beneath the pavement, a beach!”
Book details
- Open City by Teju Cole
EAN: 9780571279432
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- Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole
EAN: 9780812995787
Find this book with BOOK Finder!