the census taker
around the year i... : this census - taker, by china mieville
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finally, late in the book, this census - taker appears, on the boy’s doorstep, while his father is away. the census - taker is a native of the father’s city, and explains :
madison mega - mara... : # 74 this census - taker by china miéville
this census - taker by china miéville hardcover, $ 24. 00 penguin random house, 2016
will the census taker just go away? yes, but he or she will most certainly be back .
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a down - on - his luck census taker discovers that he has more control over the population than he thinks when the people he creates on falsified census forms come to life .
exasperated by his intrusions, a family shoots a census taker and tries to hide his body from a detective .
we’d love your help. let us know what’s wrong with this preview of this census - taker by china miéville .
this census - taker is a stunning, uncanny and profoundly moving novella from multiple award - winning author china mieville .
this resulted in what i now describe as census despair, which was heightened by the census office’s lack of transparency about the time commitment of the job .
glassdoor has 6 us census bureau reviews submitted anonymously by us census bureau employees. read employee reviews and ratings on glassdoor to decide if us census bureau is right for you .
many testing for the census taker position had to take the exam and were not dressed properly. also the positions were only for nine to twelve weeks every ten years .
the third act of this sorrowful tale concerns the census - taker. it is here that the book turns to one of the chief terrors of childhood: the inability to distinguish good from evil .
like the strange, spare fairy tales that served as inspiration for glossier disney versions, the morality of the census - taker is hazy; it’s up to the reader to interpret what’s right .
before the end credits, a final census tally of appleton types itself onto the screen .
program - the census taker, presented by charles leyburne' s bon - ton stock company, lyceum, november 16, 1900 - 1901 season. booklet .
what is the work environment and culture like at u. s. census bureau ?
mom! the census - lady is here! ” one teenager yelled as i stood on his porch, city of calgary ipad in hand. while working as a civic census taker this april and may, i also got called “sweetie” and “dear, ” mostly by elderly people. one man looked through his window and announced, “that girl - census - taker - person is here! ”
americans who, for whatever reason, do not complete and return a census bureau questionnaire can expect a personal visit from a census taker or
enumerator .
what do the enumerators - - census takers - - have to do? according to census bureau director kenneth w. prewitt' s april 5, 2000 testimony to the house subcommittee on the census ,
each enumerator is given a binder of addresses in that area that includes all those addresses for which we have not received a completed questionnaire .
“they’re so dishonest in the training, ” said maureen, a census taker for the tuxedo area this year. “they gloss over the amount of time it will take. i only wish i’d been prepared. ”
inevitably, enjoying this book means accepting that many of the questions it invites will go unanswered. though the census - taker himself—whom we don’t even meet until almost three - quarters of the way through—deals in definite numbers and data, the book as a whole is uncertain to a fault, stranding us in the befuddled perspective of its narrator. even the census - taker’s most heroic act—a successful resolution of the book’s central mystery—goes unexplained, except by implication .
if the unit was occupied by a different household on census day, the enumerator completes a questionnaire for the occupants who lived there on census day by interviewing a knowledgeable person, such as a neighbor. if the current occupants were not enumerated elsewhere, the enumerator will also complete a census questionnaire for them for their census day address. if the housing unit was vacant on census day, the enumerator completes appropriate housing questions on the questionnaire by interviewing a knowledgeable person, such as a neighbor or apartment house manager .
the census - taker exhibits every sign of evil. he carries a peculiar gun native to the father’s city, which makes a sound that previously echoed in the hills, which the father has described as coming from “the kind of shot you use to kill a man. ” the census - taker has no good explanation for what he is doing. when challenged, he asserts, “i do have this authority. to make this count. ” he pretty clearly murders the boy’s father, although, although –we do not see it. the boy closes his eyes; there are only suggestive sounds. even if it happened, though, had the father been a war criminal? if the boy’s description of his cruel, mechanical killing reflects anything, then the census - taker may represent the reach of justice. unlikely, but possible. the gentle and endlessly shifty census - taker is terrifyingly ambiguous .
how did you get your first interview at u. s. census bureau ?
1. creeping dread 2. the census taker 3. talk 4. end of home 5. emotional music 6. secret seed 7. easter woman / simple song 8. hellno 9. where is she? 10. innocence decayed 11. romanan / nice old man 12. margaret freeman 13. light' s out 14. where is she 15. passing the bottle 16. the census taker returns
if the housing unit was demolished or otherwise nonexistent under census definitions, the enumerator completes a questionnaire that provides the reason why the unit should be deleted from the census address list, by interviewing a knowledgeable respondent such as a neighbor or apartment house manager .
his new book is a novella that stretches the envelope of the description — called this census - taker — about a man looking back on the traumas of his boyhood, a prisoner whose captors call him
guest ,
and the fallibility of memory .
and so it goes until a completed census questionnaire has been completed and turned into the local census office for every housing unit address in america. like all other employees of the census bureau, enumerators are subject by law to severe penalties including imprisonment for divulging information outside of the required scope of their job .
working as a trainer at u. s. census bureau: employee reviews | urltoken
calgary is one of the few municipalities in canada that conducts a yearly census, and city hall uses the collected information to make planning decisions. according to paul denys, leader of election and census at the city of calgary, school boards receive very accurate data from the civic census that allows them to forecast school enrolment. provincial grants for transportation and libraries are also based on either civic or federal census information .
“the census is important for building communities, ” said my friend joann, who worked as a census taker in the past. “how can we know the direction for the city if we don’t know where we are? we need to know how many elderly people are here, how many kids. how else can we know where to build a school? ”
zoey duncan, a writer who worked as a census taker last year, agrees: “i wasn’t getting any information about how much time it would take and how much money we would make. ”
[ the census - taker strongly implied that the boy' s mother was once his assistant. presumably, he found her corpse in the hole and killed her murderer. a …more the census - taker strongly implied that the boy' s mother was once his assistant. presumably, he found her corpse in the hole and killed her murderer. a bit of philosophical speculation: the census - taker seems to feel responsible for everyone on his list, which would have included the boy' s father. if you twist your mind a certain way, it almost makes sense to kill the guy, so that you no longer have any obligations towards your colleague' s killer (and can recruit his conveniently orphaned kid). (less) (hide spoiler) ]
china miéville is the author of numerous books, including this census - taker, three moments of an explosion, railsea, embassytown, kraken, the city & the city, and perdido street station. his works have won the world fantasy award, the hugo award, and… more about china miéville
with the boy’s remaining parent gone, the census - taker takes him on as an intern, effectively adopting him—a turn of events so odd, and seemingly arbitrary, that it begs for more explanation than is ever offered. the boy is raised to perform a set of tasks that remain unclear, and he arrives at adulthood with this chilling quality: that he recounts his childhood without remarking on the lacunae. what is captivating in a boy, however, becomes subtly horrific in a man: that he has never sought to resolve the gaps in his understanding. that he allows the census - taker to remain suspended in the overlap of good and evil, a moral position the narrator now occupies as well. ultimately, this census - taker takes on the nostalgia of the corrupt for their innocence .
he' s also been compared to karen russell and george saunders, and rightfully so. anyone who gets excited about language quirks and almost - surreal scenes will feel at home on the hilltop where this census - taker is set .
i also feel like “it was earth all along” is the kind of thing mieville avoids most of the time. however o do think that this census taker being set in bas lag would make sense. it’s location in the world would be vague, but the hints make sense as new crobuzon .
since the figures of the census taken by the democratic state officials in this city have come to be known, those best qualified to judge in such matters have been satisfied that the census as returned was grossly inaccurate in its details, if not in the aggregate population. view full article in timesmachine »
civic duty is an old - fashioned concept, but it’s a good reason to be a census taker. more importantly, it’s a good reason to pick up the phone and call the person who left that little blue slip in your mailbox (seriously) .
is the novella this census - taker just a prologue to a longer, more epic work? will we read more in the future about this world, its history, and the life of the narrator? if this is indeed the fourth bas - lag book, is it just the prelude to an upcoming fifth one? i hope we find out soon .
reading china mieville is a little like being kidnapped. you’re not quite sure what’s happening, you’re not sure where you going, and afterwards, you’re not sure where you’ve been. that’s where the analogy ends, because china mieville is a wonderful experience and this census - taker, his latest story, is another great one. one of mieville’s strengths is immersing you in a world that is a surreal yet contains tantalizing elements of familiarity. this census - taker is the story of a boy who lives on
we may be in a post - apocalyptic world; all we learn is that “there has been trouble. fighting. ” the census - taker does not arrive until a few pages from the end, and is there only because he has to count, to make a record .
and besides, i now understand that people don’t become census takers for the money. “they do it for the exercise, to get some fresh air, ” said the city of calgary employee who chatted with me when i dropped off my ipad at the end of my gig. and they do it, he said, because they care about their city. “it’s my civic duty, ” said one of my neighbours who once worked as a census taker .
though it can shade to purple, miéville’s baroque language—his archaic vocabulary and obtuse phrasings—serves a purpose. in its excess it sketches a kind of engaged bewilderment, underscoring the essential otherness of the worlds he imagines into being. in this census - taker, that’s of a piece with the book’s general commitment to uncertainty, its elaborate phrases amplifying the interrogative demands it makes on the reader .
ask a question about working or interviewing at u. s. census bureau. our community is ready to answer .
his census - taker, a longish novella, dislocates from the first line: “a boy ran down a hill path screaming. the boy was i. he held his hands up and out in front of him... ” the plot seems launched; the boy lives on an isolated hilltop above the town, and has come to report that his mother has killed his father, an outsider to the district .
it’s been out for quite a while, but i just recently got around to reading china miéville’s latest book, the novella this census - taker. it was a really quick read, at just 130 pages, and i very much enjoyed it, although i wish it had been longer and explored the setting a bit more .
i can' t sit here and sagely type to you the meaning of this census - taker. neither its plot or its deeper, thematic meaning. i am full of confusions and questions and speculations. i do know that i was dazzled by miéville' s prose - - which i often am - - but in a new way, a foggy, struggling, back tracking, joseph conrad way. i didn' t realize it until i wrote those words, but the novel i most closely relate to this census - taker has to be conrad' s heart of darkness. there is colonization at work her
hi hedrigal, i havent read census taker myself yet, but reading this article reminded me of a theory i saw somewhere (it may even have been this site) that bas - lag is our world after the reality - breaking / altering cataclysm with the ghosthead empire (i think the theory was based on new crobuzon being a post - crisis beijing and that the anophelli island (s) were australia or new zealand). that way the inclusion of modern tech or artifacts that point to our world would still be consistent with the bas - lag theory – it could just mean that census taker’s setting is geographically so far away from new crobuzon that they still have access to pre - crisis tech or they have rediscovered it .
this was the first soundtrack that was commissioned to the residents. but don' t expect a full or even a partial orchestra here. it' s about as minimal as the residents gets as far as instruments go. it seems to be all electronic. it' s as weird as the residents can get too, that weird humor. it' s only fitting that it was penn jillette (yes the one from penn and teller) that recommended the residents as the band to do the soundtrack. i haven' t seen the movie, so i wouldn' t know whether it was well done or not, but it is billed as a black comedy. the plot is about a very irritating census taker who keeps asking a certain couple questions that keep getting more abusive and ludicrous to the point that the couple decide to kill the census taker and then have to get a friend to help them hide the body. that' s all i know about it .
[ is his father killed in the end? there is only a little mention of him after the boy comes out of the cave .
in my father' s workroom i looked at the table all mucky with metal dust. the room felt saturated with his presence, felt like he was speaking in it .
there was also some sounds the census taker makes when he comes back to the cave to get the boy and asks him to keep eyes closed. any idea what happened there? (hide spoiler) ]
this census - taker begins, “a boy ran down a hill path screaming. the boy was i. ” the narrative is being told in recollection by the boy, now an adult. as a child, the boy lived with his distant father and stern mother in a rickety house on a semi - arid hill outside a small town. the hill and the town occupy a four - way world, depicted with elements of the age of electricity, the age of steam, the trappings of science fiction, and the trappings of fantasy, though no one element is emphasized or decisive. the opening scene ends :
i applied to be a “girl - census - taker - person” because i imagined it would be the perfect job for a writer: it would get me out of the house and—a writer’s dream come true! —it would actually pay money. i imagined that i would walk through sunny streets, chat with neighbours, get fit, and meet many adorable cats .
- people are nonresponsive to census at times; face rejection occasionally - higher management is completely lost; the orders to count 40, 000 + residents at penn state were given within the last month of the school semester; consequently they had no idea what they were doing and didn' t even know enough to give us the names of people who didn' t respond to the census. therefore we had to go to every single housing unit to recount every student (many of whom were rightfully frustrated since they had already completed their census form on time )
i think census should be taken every 5 years instead of 10 as population explodes every year and a 10 year statistic could be incorrect .
for all my frustration with this opaque novel, i came to its end understanding that miéville’s obscurantism serves one of his career - spanning themes—one that is, in fact, more evident here than in many of his more crowd - pleasing books. a political scientist by training, miéville imbues his stories with a deep distaste for state - sponsored power. census - taking is, of course, one mechanism of that power, a power that affirms and stabilizes itself through the elaboration of standards and norms. this census - taker, like the novel in which he appears, doesn’t quite fit the mold. he has, we gradually learn, gone rogue, suggesting that to reject statistical certainty may be to resist power itself. what does this census - taker propose that we put in its place? it’s possible that we’ll never know .
the filmmakers chose the residents to perform the soundtrack as they were suggested by penn jilette .
basically data collection for the 2010 us census. my role was training people and helping people knock on doors, find people, and ask census questions. i also had to collect the data from all the workers in my team, and turn everything over in a specific package format to my supervisor. it is notable that everything done at that level was done on paper .
' this census - taker' is a quiet book with a murderous heart china mieville' s new novella feels like a fairy tale. it' s set in an isolated hill village, where a young boy witnesses a terrible crime and meets a mysterious stranger who may (or may not) help him .
for readers of george saunders, kelly link, and karen russell, this census taker is the poignant and uncanny new novella from award - winning and bestselling author china miéville. after witnessing a profoundly traumatic event, a boy is left alone in a remote house on a hilltop with his increasingly deranged parent. when a stranger knocks on his door, the boy senses that his
what i really want to do in this post is just nerd out a bit, and examine those clues i talked about. i want to see if i can structure an argument to convince myself, let alone anyone else, of my hunch. i really want to ask the question: is this census - taker set in bas - lag ?
he looked like a failed soldier. dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing. oh china, you coy wretch. promise and no delivery, or at least an awkward variety. the census - taker is an austerity tale, one set after the robots revolt. all skycorp and shit, except matters have settled bronze age. the opening sections reminded me of the wasp factory, but despite shimmering examples of trades being depicted, the tale only introduced its titular character essentially as
that, i think, was the only drawback of the book: miéville revels in describing fantastic worlds — it’s his biggest strength as a writer, in my opinion — so for him to take such a restrained approach with this census - taker means that i’m left feeling the tiniest bit deprived. i wish miéville had expanded the end, and unveiled more and more of this weird world. i wish we could have seen the narrator’s full journey from his childhood to the “present day” from which he tells his story .
the boy escapes, is caught, escapes again, is caught again. his friends, the orphans, hatch a plan to help him but it goes wrong. writing as a much older man, the narrator is sure only of his boyhood terror. his conviction that, sooner or later, his father would kill him, too. that is, until the arrival of the census - taker — the odd man with the glasses and the tie, the books of figures and a gun, who has come to ask questions. to find certain people and record them. to talk, in this case, with the boy' s father .
denys says it isn’t easy to find 900 people able to work as census takers on casual, limited - term contracts, especially in a city with low unemployment. but organizing and funding the census is worthwhile for the city. according to denys, the data collected each year is “vital to managing (calgary’s) continued growth and to ensuring that we are ready and able to address the challenges and needs that are before us. ”
in fact, an undercover detective - posing as a census - taker - introduces us, in a contrived way, to the dreams, secrets, customs and eccentricities of this tight - knit community, over which the disabled former firefighter john edward castle, now a local radio dj, has a bird' s - eye view. on a long oblong stage, shimmer curtain at one end, castle' s bedroom castle in the air at the other ,
the tide rises and the tide falls
for the residents of this backwater yorkshire town, jerusalem .
i implore you to read embassytown and the city & the city! they are two of the best pieces of speculative fiction from the last decade, easily, in my opinion. neither is written in a style similar to this census - taker. the worlds are fully fleshed out, the plots complex and completely followed through, the viewpoints that of adults who more - or - less have an understanding of the world around them. the city & the city does have one mystery in it that i would say only half - resolves, but it feels appropriate, and doesn' t keep the story from having climax and closure. i think both are really dazzling in their ideas and imaginative scope! (less )
but when it was raining and the screen of my ipad was too wet to use, when dogs snarled at me, when doors were literally shut in my face, sometimes civic duty didn’t cut it. so why didn’t i quit? i kept going due to a heightened sense of obligation and guilt—the same thing that compels me to accompany my mom to costco when she asks me—and because being a census taker is fascinating .
3. 5 stars. it' s not the epic novel china miéville' s readers have been anxiously awaiting since 2010' s embassytown. (that will come with 2016' s the last days of new paris .) but his novella this census - taker proves that the new weird superstar has not lost the ability to captivate and unnerve. as with all of miéville' s work, it begins with a city, sprawling incongruously up the slopes of a pair of steep hills (or perhaps small mountain peaks), the gap between spanned by a bridge. near the top of on
the gradual solution of the crime involves the differentiation between the fantastical conspiracy of an entire hidden city, and the squalid, real - life conspiracy of criminal politicians and businessmen who murdered a young woman who became inconvenient. thus the conspiracy comes loose from the lacuna; the conspiracy is broken up, but the question of the third city remains unresolved .
this is a book about childhood trauma, memory, identity, and the difficulty placed upon kids who begin to suspect that the authority to whom they' re subservient may be corrupt, and that the world has hostile forces they aren' t meant to understand. i think the meaning of its ending is less clear than mieville intends for it to be, but for the most part this census - taker is compact and really well - realized, especially in terms of location and atmosphere. he should write more short novels like this
the bareness of the environment harmonises with the stoic bleakness of the book’s emotions. our boy, whatever his name is, however old he is, lives up one of the mountains with a grimly inexpressive mother and a father prone to psychopathic episodes, in which he pounds small animals to death and pitches the carcasses into a bottomless pit in a cave. whether or not his father kills her, his mother disappears, and neither the street kids down below nor the adults of the town can rescue him from the silent, fearful house on the hill – until a census - taker in a stained suit and tie comes to the door. there is bareness, spareness, entropy, everywhere except in the language. that, on the contrary, is elaborate and fastidious and slightly dictionary - drunk, so that the words rendering all this scarcity are “vatic”’ and “pinchbeck”, “scends” and “chevon” .
the boy’s repeated, thwarted attempts to escape are fable - like in their tragicness, until, in keeping with the genre, a fairy godfather appears. a trim and dapper man offers an escape from his fear - filled life - - an escape to the far - away land his father originally comes from. the man is the titular census - taker, and it’s his job to keep track of the far - flung people from his home, the boy’s father included. he seems calm, and potentially manipulative, raising questions about whether he’s to be trusted, and whether the boy’s father is as wretched as he’s made out to be .
he looked like a failed soldier. dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing. oh china, you coy wretch. promise and no delivery, or at least an awkward variety. the census - taker is an austerity tale, one set after the robots revolt. all skycorp and shit, except matters have settled bronze age. the opening sections reminded me of the wasp factory, but despite shimmering examples of trades being depicted, the tale only introduced its titular character essentially as an epilogue. from my hip one could read this as double indemnity of the next dark age .
this census taker is a small, quiet and gentle book with murder at its center. it' s a beautiful chocolate that you bite into and find filled with blood. it is miéville at his most sparse, his most controlled and restrained — giving us a world defined by a broken carburetor, the sound of a walk being swept, a pantry full of mushrooms and spiders, the distant flickering of neon. and while the blind spots of the boy at its heart — the things he does not know, the questions he does not ask — may drive you crazy, the questions that miéville leaves itching in your brain at the turn of the final page are almost as interesting as the (few) truths that have been uncovered .
the fictional suburban community of appleton is turned upside down thanks to harvey mcgraw, an annoying census taker who' s in charge of checking the neighborhood' s population. when harvey visits george and martha dade, they reluctantly invite him in, but when the questionnaire turns too personal for the couple, they accidentally shoot him in the forehead. they are then forced to hide his body from their company, martha' s sister eva and her husband pete, a former detective. when he discovers harvey' s body in the kitchen closet, a bright future is very unlikely for george and martha .
in modernity the loss of the bedrock sense of the divine caused, at first, a reverse of the epiphanic quality of the lacuna. while it had once been a gesture toward the mystery, it began to represent instead the maddening absence of god—first, in 1853, in bartleby, the scrivener :
most importantly, in an interview conducted after the release of this census - taker, miéville was asked if he would ever return to bas - lag, and his answer, while not definitive, seems to lean towards a “maybe one day but not yet”. but, who knows. he could be choosing not to reveal too much in the initial press coverage of the book’s release. if he truly buried these clues in there for fans to find, then it would make sense that he wouldn’t go and spill the beans immediately .
in the most creative of writing, a puzzle is set up which is resolved not as the sum of the established set of parts, but rather through an unexpected image which both resolves the puzzle and introduces a revelatory new element–something which could never have been anticipated. in a sense, miéville performs such a lateral synthesis with this census - taker. it addresses the original lacuna of the divine mystery, and the harrowing lacuna of the modern loss of god; it addresses the lacuna as psychological phenomenon, and as mechanism of structural interest. it does all these things in an utterly unexpected way: by fusing these elements naturally into the perspective of a boy as recalled by a broken man. the boy is moved by a child’s almost religious sense of wonder and by a child’s terror at the loss of his parents. the book presents lacunae both as lapses in the cognition of a child and as defense mechanisms in the psychopathology of a man. the dense tapestry of overlapping absences dextrously meets the challenge of lacuna as structural peculiarity .
with the headline: a false census. ; a sample of democratic frauds. a plan to give new - york city an undue proportion op senators and assemblymen - - glaring errors in the returns filed by enumerators - - a demand for legislative inquiry .
for readers of george saunders, kelly link, and karen russell, this census taker is the poignant and uncanny new novella from award - winning and bestselling author china miéville. after witnessing a profoundly traumatic event, a boy is left alone in a remote house on a hilltop with his increasingly deranged parent. when a stranger knocks on his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation are over—but by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? is he the boy’s friend? his enemy? or something altogether other ?
tinker, tailor, soldier... lady: unmasking the women who spied for the stuarts after the civil war
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at its most obtuse moments, this census - taker feels as if it had been crafted out of the cast - off fragments of an unfinished samuel beckett novel. and yet occasional images of unusual beauty await the attentive and patient: on the underside of a bridge, a gang of children casts rods out into the air, trawling not for fish but for bats. in his workshop, the narrator’s father dips his fingers into colored powders to shape keys that may unlock strange powers. if these sequences sometimes befuddle they’re no less elegant for it. the very density of miéville’s ideas both contributes to and compensates for our alienation .
let me begin my discussion of this census - taker (2016) by admitting that i love this book. for me, it stands in relation to all but the best of miéville’s previous work as the thing itself stands in relation to a description of the thing; not like recounting a dream, but like dreaming it. it treats very little, and yet the things it treats, it plumbs to the marrow. it reveals something precious. in it, the grip of the author’s hand eases at last, so that he scarcely pushes the words; therefore it is a book of few words, stripped of excess until those words achieve a heartbreaking clarity. this book represents a breakthrough for miéville .
the concept, reduced to a girl ate what was given her, recurs throughout the book; but the details of the event are never supplied. the lacuna - as - trauma haunts the novel and animates avice’s detachment. what might in a more trivial concealment register as mere euphemism takes on the stature of the lacuna when the key facts of the character are generally stated but specifically unspoken .
a false census. ; a sample of democratic frauds. a plan to give new - york city an undue proportion op senators and assemblymen - - glaring errors in the returns filed by enumerators - - a demand for legislative inquiry. - the new york times
i really hope that i’m right about this census - taker, that it hides a similar setting - based puzzle in its pages. it would be another layer of depth to what’s already such a layered and intoxicating story. an alternative possibility is that miéville put the references in knowingly as a fun, metafictional treat for his fans, but the book just isn’t set in bas - lag. the most disappointing possibility is that i’m totally reading too much into it, and all of the clues i’ve mentioned are coincidences. i really doubt this possibility though .
it’s later revealed that the keys may possess supernatural abilities, but whether these hexes are the result of real magic or simply magical thinking is never made clear. that’s the special power of miéville’s writing: he dives right into the language and conventions of far - off worlds, rather than overburdening the reader with unnaturally related details. like le guin, he has an anthropological approach to fantasy and science - fiction; unlike many of le guin’s books, this census - taker isn’t narrated by an outsider, but by an uncritical character in the throes of the action. the boy - narrator doesn’t pause to explain his peculiar word choices, resulting in earthy, playful, sonorous sentences that are a pleasure to explore .
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china miéville’s dazzlingly inventive fantasies and sf novels have long broken the bounds of genre; his new novella this census - taker, a strange, nebulous fable about a traumatised young boy, proved almost impossible to pin down, prompting both admiration and incomprehension. “the power of imprecision has long fascinated miéville, ” declared jacob brogan in slate. “at its most obtuse moments, this census - taker feels as if it had been crafted out of the cast - off fragments of an unfinished samuel beckett novel. ” “longtime miéville readers are going to wonder exactly what they’re reading, ” agreed nk jemisin in the new york times, for whom the book risked being “an exercise in haunting, lovely frustration”. “miéville is justly regarded as one of the most interesting and freakishly gifted writers of his generation, ” declared andrew mckie in the daily telegraph. plot summary is pointless: the novella “is all atmosphere and delivery. the prose is as precise, but it has been chiselled into a realistic depiction of fog. it is eerie, but solid. when i rubbed away at the surface, i found – i think – a story with a meaning and a resolution. it may not be the story you find … it’s well worth reading, though. ”
the book describes the narrator’s life before and after whatever happened, happened. his parents are reticent and distant, from each other and their child. his mother is local, and once worked in a distant city; now she ekes plants from the stony earth. his father is not local, and is a key - maker: these keys seem to have magical or talismanic properties. his father is prone to sudden outbursts of rage, beating stray animals to death and, the boy suspects, he may have killed one of his customers as well. unlike their few neighbours they do not burn their refuse, but tip it into a chasm inside the mountain. the boy has seen his father jettison the corpses into the hole, and dreams of a mountain of debris and refuse inside the mountain. the only affection he gets is from vagabond children who live on the bridge in the town below. the only justice he might get will come in the form of the kafka - esque census - taker .
the closed circuit game: a hippie noir the end ennobles every act. — honoré de balzac, “the ...
the next stage of the mysterious city’s history is the great census - taking, which we only hear about in very vague terms in this book. for some reason the city decides that it needs to send agents out into the world to find out where all of its citizens are. sounds like the kind of paranoid reaction new crobuzon’s government might have. could we find out more about this in a future bas - lag book ?
this same trope makes a new appearance in miéville’s latest novel, this census - taker, though by now it’s clear that he’s applied the same techniques to his own work—with sometimes mixed results. when he’s at his most imaginative, his stories are storms of ideas, flurries of concepts that pelt the reader like hailstones. within the weird worlds of his novels, anything that might be is, the strange tangoing with the stranger. nevertheless, more than a decade after the scar, he’s still weaponizing the very idea of inexactitude: late in the new book, the titular civil servant shows off his own armament, a double - barreled rifle that fires buckshot from one of its ports and solid slugs from the other. “it spreads possibilities, ” he tells the story’s young narrator. “like an average. a range and its mean. this is an averaging gun. ”
a false census. ; a sample of democratic frauds. a plan to give new - york city an undue proportion op senators and assemblymen - - glaring errors in the returns filed by enumerators - - a demand for legislative inquiry .
good. creepy. tight. feels wolfe - esque in its studied care with metaphor and peculiar first person narration. that leads me, in turn, to suspect textual trickery (along with occasional slips in voice like
the boy is i
), but without the anchoring framework of something like six days and seven nights in america, or the fifth head of cerberus, i lack an angle of attack. what here is the predecessor' s voice? vs. current census - taker? etc. it' s short and well written. definitely worth a look, like
as an avid fan of the twilight zone, this movie kept my attention with the flowing plot and the great actors which never fall into the melodramatic or wink at the audience. with an unexpected twistful ending, it falls right up there with the rest of the old episodes i love .
not all the stories were sad. my most memorable census moment was when i visited the house i’ve always been curious about. its occupants don’t seem to have the same need for privacy that most suburban calgarians do. on warm evenings, they sit in their front yard to listen to music, talk and laugh .
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here the book offers a key to the unsettling eclipse of its narrative. the boy’s own intuitive sense of these gaps, and his response to them, is captured in the sketch of the fence and the tree. he notes the absence, and relishes its boundaries with that primal sense, touch, as he occupies the space freed up and still defined by the missing object. the anecdote captures the intensity and sense of magic in childhood, and the process of organic completion that comes naturally to children’s minds .
the city where the narrator’s father is from is a mystery in itself. it gets mentioned a lot throughout the story, and we find out eventually that it’s where the census takers are from as well. the city has a specific history that is told by drobe on page 58: first there was a war with “mechanicals” (which is supposedly where that creepy wooden head that haunts the narrator is from), then “problems on the trains”, then two wars, “one inside, one out” .
2017 hugos nominee for best novella, and i honestly don' t know what to make of this book. it' s purposefully cryptic and vague, and there' s a haziness of identity throughout - -
the boy
vs .
i
vs .
you
, our narrator blurring pronouns in his retelling - - and the chronology see - saws back and forth, and yet that wasn' t even the problem. i could follow that easily enough. where this census - taker lost me was the meandering prose and a lack of direction, and that it so stubbornly refuses categorisat
over and over again, book after book, miéville’s mature work forces the reader to ask the question that most writers get to prompt once in a literary lifetime if they’re lucky: what is this new thing we are being shown? repeatedly, as a writer of the fantastic, he forces a redefinition of what fantasy can be. the answer in this census - taker is as different from the one in embassytown as embassytown was from the city & the city. the marvellous, we learn from this marvellous and strange little book, need not even be a question of subject matter at all. it is optic, an angle of vision, a new - ground lens applied to a world that, through it, swims and bleeds and discloses what it would not have done otherwise .
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review from speculative herald: urltoken 4. 5 / 5 stars this census - taker, in its novella length, provides the reader with a glorious and powerful enigma of a story. it is haunting, chilling, disturbing and touching and mesmerizing and absolutely beautiful. i could not stop reading this as i just craved to understand what was going on. it starts with a young boy running faster than he has ever run. running from some unimaginable horror, and then we find out it involves
this struggle plays out in the evolving role of the intentional lacuna. the stain and the scar are offhanded absences, background detail, deployed mainly for dramatic emphasis in the context of a bewilderingly crowded landscape. by the time he publishes the city and the city (2009), though, his attention turns more specifically to the lacunae. in this surreal crime novel, two cities occupy the same geographical space, existing in uneasy overlap through the fine subdivision of territory. the complexity of this subdivision opens the possibility that cartographic errors have left room for a third city, a city in the gaps. the lacuna here is identified with one of its frequent companions, the conspiracy. they are superficially similar: the information content of a conspiracy is concealed, while that of a lacuna is unknowable. for the time being, they appear the same because one does not know the important facts about either one .
if there is a younger version of robinson in the english language, it must be china miéville. more influenced by postmodernists like j. g. ballard but also well within the socialistic literary lineage of science fiction, miéville was born in 1972 and educated in international relations and british left politics as well as what he likes to call “weird literature. ” no summary of his earlier work, ranging widely and twice from fiction to non - fiction (the latest is october, his own historical account of the russian revolution), can simplify it generically. so let us turn to his latest fiction, a little gem entitled this census taker .
although the census questions are relatively impersonal, sometimes they brought out heartbreaking stories. when asked about transportation to work, one woman told me that no one in her house travels anywhere. “my son is too sick to work and my mom has alzheimer’s. ”
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in the steampunkish worlds of miéville’s fictions—and perhaps in this census - taker most of all—the possible and the unknowable meet in the uncertain. for most of his new book’s length, its narrator lives in his ramshackle family home on a rough and uncivilized hill. there are, he sometimes suggests, creatures on that hill at night, dangerous creatures, possibly even monstrous ones. and yet we never quite glimpse them. by day, things larger than birds sweep their shadows over the ground, but they fly so high that we never learn whether they’re dragons or airplanes. indeed, though there’s talk of weather - watchers and hermits and witches elsewhere on the tangled slope, it’s hard to say whether this is a truly magical world or merely one of pervasive superstition.
the census taker is a 1984 black comedy directed by bruce r. cook . it stars greg mullavey , meredith macrae , timothy bottoms , and garrett morris . the film was the residents ' first film soundtrack commission when their participation was suggested by penn jillette to cook . it was released by trans world entertainment on vhs in 1988 under the title husbands , wives , money & murder . 
the census taker is a 1984 black comedy directed by bruce r. cook. it stars greg mullavey, meredith macrae, timothy bottoms, and garrett morris. the film was the residents' first film soundtrack commission when their participation was suggested by penn jillette to cook. it was released by trans world entertainment on vhs in 1988 under the title husbands, wives, money & murder.
the census taker is a 1984 black comedy directed by bruce r. cook. it stars greg mullavey, meredith macrae, timothy bottoms, and garrett morris. the film was the residents' first film soundtrack commission when their participation was suggested by penn jillette to cook. it was released by trans world entertainment on vhs in 1988 under the title husbands, wives, money & murder.