Stoic man walking through ‘Open City’

Part German, part Nigerian, and in his early 30s, Julius is doing residency in a psychiatric training program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The time is post-9/11, 2006-2007. The economy is in shambles: Tower Records has declared bankruptcy; Blockbuster stores are closing. The world is ridding itself of its dictators: “The Last King of Scotland’’ is showing; Saddam Hussein is executed — but one has the feeling others will replace them. Like Camus’s Meursault, Julius is unemotional. But his stoicism concerns the terrible history he recounts and the modern atrocities he witnesses. The reader will wonder near the novel’s end whether Julius himself might benefit from becoming the subject of his professional practice.

Throughout the novel, Julius walks and broods in the streets of New York, and, for a couple of weeks, Brussels. The walks begin as therapy. He discovers that “[e]ach neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight.’’ Soon, though, the walks became normal.

He has recently broken up with his girlfriend Nadège. Julius enjoys poetry and classical music, especially Mahler’s symphonies. He has few friends — the 89-year-old specialist in early English literature and mentor Dr. Saito, and a fellow about his own age who likes jazz, a fondness that Julius tolerates. After work at the hospital, Julius roams New York and ponders the past and present. A loner and amateur historian (judging by his historical commentary) kin to Sartre’s Roquentin, Julius seems to be on a quest of self-understanding, but he never directly addresses major questions. And instead of being nauseated by history, he suffers fits of memory loss, which play a part later when a friend from Nigeria confronts him about a crime.