Census (urspr publ 2018; utgåvan 2018)

Quan el pare d'un jove amb síndrome de Down, vidu, rep la notícia que li queden pocs mesos de vida, apareix l'angoixa sobre el futur del seu fill, a qui estima intensament. Sense cap recurs ni pla, i amb el desig de veure el país en un darrer viatge,l'home accepta la feina de realitzar un estrany cens per a una misteriosa oficina governamental. Aquest és l'inici d'un viatge que portarà pare i fill per diferents ciutats, que l'autor anomena amb les lletres de l'alfabet, a través del qual coneixeran tot el que té de bo i de dolent la naturalesa humana. I a mida que s'acosten a la ciutat Z, el darrer destí, el pare haurà d'enfrontar-se a algunes de les preguntes que no s'ha volgut fer fins ara: Quin és el propòsit del cens? N'és còmplice? I, sobretot, com serà capaç d'aprendre a acomiadar-se del seu fill?

"People like this are small; it is almost always possible to escape them in those first moments, but once you consent then what is real for them becomes real for you and it is hard to find a way out." ( )

Clearly I am not intellectual enough for this book; where others have seen imagery and meaning, I found a bunch of random paragraphs with no sense of cohesion at all. Cormorants? Someone suggesting a doctor leave one of his instruments in a patient? Bizarre “clown” acts that involve doing nothing but stare at the audience for an hour? I thought this was meant to be about a father-son relationship.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text. In the case of Census, someone took the typewriter away too soon and came up with this garbled mess instead. ( )

Jesse Ball had a brother with Down Syndrome and as a child, he envisioned taking care of his brother when they were both adults. Sadly, his brother died in his 20s. Ball wrote this book to envision what that life might have been like, with the main character raising a child with Down Syndrome. In the novel, the father knows he is dying, so he and his son set off on a weird road trip. I've heard it took him a week to write this, but if this book was to honor his sweet hearted brother, I feel he should have put a little more work into it. With such a tough subject matter for him, the writing did seem at a remove. The book is one of those 'collection of profound tiny moments' sort of books (see Rachel Khong's 'Goodbye Vitamin'). But of the other from Jesse Ball I've read, he seems to write those sorts of books. This book reminded me of a Tarkovsky movie: the plot makes little sense but the details and imagery are freakin beautiful. ( )

I really tried to like this more. I did not succeed. It was so mannered and distant. Staccato and episodic so that even if some of the episodes had flashes of brilliance they would have worked better as flash fiction because they weren't contributing to my sense of this novel.

The subject matter was so personal and heartbreaking that I couldn't get past the lack of emotion and intimacy in its presentation. It might have been fine as a shorter work, but as a full-length book, it was frustrating and exhausting. ( )