Abstract
ABSTRACT In Teju Cole’s novels Every Day Is for the Thief (2007, 2014) and Open City (2011), big city life is explored from the perspective of narrators who are outsiders to the cities they describe. They thus give rather distanced, journalistic reports about their experiences. Both novels convey their meaning via spatio-temporal conceptions that I analyze with the help of urban theories by Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. The narrator of Open City learns to uncover spatial memory by walking the streets of New York City – spatial memory lays bare the painful source of his emotional detachment and ultimately forces him to acknowledge a crime he committed in the past. The narrator of Every Day Is for the Thief at first seems to engage in a more conventional recovery of submerged childhood memory but then also explores the specific relationship between space and memory.
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