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CENSUS

Jesse Ball

Named one of the most anticipated books of 2018 by:
The New York Times • The Chicago Reader • Nylon • The Huffington Post • The Rumpus • The AV Club • Southern Living • The Millions • Buzzfeed

A powerful and moving new novel from an award-winning, acclaimed author: in the wake of a devastating revelation, a father and son journey north across a tapestry of towns

When a widower receives notice from a doctor that he doesn't have long left to live, he is struck by the question of who will care for his adult son—a son whom he fiercely loves, a boy with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind, and with a desire to see the country on one last trip, the man signs up as a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and leaves town with his son.

Traveling into the country, through towns named only by ascending letters of the alphabet, the man and his son encounter a wide range of human experience. While some townspeople welcome them into their homes, others who bear the physical brand of past censuses on their ribs are wary of their presence. When they press toward the edges of civilization, the landscape grows wilder, and the towns grow farther apart and more blighted by industrial decay. As they approach “Z,” the man must confront a series of questions: What is the purpose of the census? Is he complicit in its mission? And just how will he learn to say good-bye to his son?

Mysterious and evocative, Census is a novel about free will, grief, the power of memory, and the ferocity of parental love, from one of our most captivating young writers.

Jesse Ball is the author of fourteen books, most recently the novel How to Set a Fire and Why. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was long-listed for the National Book Award. He was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

ZENSUS
Deutsch von Alexander Lippmann
[HC: luftschacht 10/2022]
Available products
Book

Published 2018-03-01 by Ecco Press

Comments

You don't have to have any particular interest in Down's syndrome to connect with this aspect of the book: it isn't a polemic about special needs, but a detailed and moving portrayal of a kind of radical innocence, one that brings both the cruelty and the kindness in the world around it into sharp focus. For me, it was the most powerful of the many surprises in this unusual, impressive novel.

Ball's mind-bending, gorgeously well told, and profoundly moving fable celebrates a father's love for his son, whose quintessense is to inspire people to be their better selves. (starred review)

This is a novel about how compassion and love move far beyond familial duty...Census is an odd, poignant, vitalizing novel well worth the journey.

France: Le Seuil; NL: Querido; Czech Rep.: Albatros;

Winner of the Gordon Burn prize

In eight novels produced in just over a decade, [Ball] has combined Kafka's paranoia with Whitman's earnest American grain to found a fictional kingdom of genial doom and melancholia...Census, Ball's new work, his most personal and best to date, was inspired by his brother, Abram, who had Down syndrome and endured dozens of surgeries...I can think of no higher praise for this novel than to echo what this woman tells the father for traveling with his son, for letting the world experience his gift: ‘I think you cannot know the good you do.'

Cormac McCarthy's The Road comes to mind when you read this pared-to-the-bone tale of a widower and his son on a northward journey to chart the population of an unspecified America-like country...I defy anyone not to read its final pages through tears.

Ball's latest is an intensely moving and dazzlingly imagined journey...This novel is a devastatingly powerful call for understanding and compassion. (starred review)

An ethereal meditation on love, the duty of a caretaker, and mortality.

His most emotionally affecting book to date... a profound and stirring meditation on love, loss and paternity.

Australia: Text Publishing; UK: Granta; Italy: NN Editore; Catalan: Rata; China: Beijing Mediatime; Korea: Soso Books; Czech: Albatros; France: Seuil; Holland: Querido; Turkey Alfa; Portugal: Bazarov Ediçõe;

Census is a fiction of shattering impact in part because its fabulist tendrils erupt from the author's own love for a brother: Abram Ball was born with Down syndrome and died, in 1998, after becoming quadriplegic and requiring a ventilator...On one hand, this is a pure love story embedded within an ancient travel narrative. On the other, it is an artistic undertaking of the most sophisticated sort—richly imagined, cleverly sequenced, even typographically propulsive as the census towns stamp themselves upon Ball's literary map. One thinks of W.G. Sebald and Italo Calvino, but the comparators fade. This is Ball. This is his story. This is his memory and however he wishes to elaborate it.

CENSUS is a vital testament to selfless love; a psalm to commonplace miracles; and a mysterious evolving metaphor. So kind, it aches. – David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

Guardian article on winning the Gordon Burn prize Read more...