A novel without plot? characters? - not for everyone, but many will love Open City

As we read along further in Teju Cole's debut novel, "Open City," we learn somewhat more about the narrator and his life: his name is Julius, he was born/raised in Nigeria of a Yoruba father and German mother, went to military high school in Nigeria and then to "Maxwell" college in the U.S., is estranged from mother's side of family now living in Europe/Belgium, was involved with a woman named Nadege(?) who has moved to SF. These are the facts of the novel, but not what this novel is about. The novel is about the narrator's (and hence the author's) mind, about his wide range of knowledge, the way he thinks and observes, and the way he listens and gathers up the stories of others. The narrator's personal history and his own story line are incidental - as noted in previous blogs, much like the work of Sebald, particularly "Austerlitz," which I posted on recently as well. Julius, as he tells us in the first paragraph, gains knowledge, insight, and solace by wandering the streets of New York, and the novel takes us on many of his wanderings, including a long walk from the upper West Side to the site of the World Trade Center, with stops on Wall Street and along the Hudson, and much meditation not so much on 9/11 but on the way black water surrounds Manhattan, like the nothingness that surrounds our short spans of life, and other smart and weird insights - the smell of salt air, the graveyard in the middle of Wall Street, people herded like animals on way to slaughter as they cross highways on pedestrian overpasses or walk between cyclone fences, and many others. There is also a rather long section in which Julius visits an immigrant detention center in Queens, terrific description of the distrct with repair shops and barbed wire, and he listens to a Liberian refugee tell his story - visit came about because Nadege(?) volunteers for her church group. As is typical of Open City, we learn virtually nothing about her or about their relationship - their relationship is the key that opens the door to these other observations. This novel definitely not for everyone in that it has none of the elements - character, plot - that usually propel fiction or draw us to fiction, but it's a near unique literary feat and admirers of Proust, Sebald, Dreams of My Russian Summer - novels that border on literary memoir - should read Open City. Upside to Cole's talent is enormous.