Ricardo 🐈 reviewed This Census-Taker by Howard Hughes
Review of 'This Census-Taker' on 'GoodReads'
3 stars
I started reading this book expecting the sort of wonderful narrative I had read in Perdido Street Station and The Scar. However, I was in for a slight disappointment.
The story recounts the childhood of the narrator from his point of view. This makes the narrator doubly unreliable: on one hand, his childish perception of the events is distorted and his knowledge of them incomplete; on the other hand, the passing of time between him living the events he recounts and writing his memories down years later introduces additional deviations.
While the point of view in the entire story is always from the same character, each section changes how it is presented: on one section the narrator is always referred to as "the boy", the next it could be "he", "I" or even "you". Although it made the story harder to grasp and slightly uncomfortable to read, it was …
I started reading this book expecting the sort of wonderful narrative I had read in Perdido Street Station and The Scar. However, I was in for a slight disappointment.
The story recounts the childhood of the narrator from his point of view. This makes the narrator doubly unreliable: on one hand, his childish perception of the events is distorted and his knowledge of them incomplete; on the other hand, the passing of time between him living the events he recounts and writing his memories down years later introduces additional deviations.
While the point of view in the entire story is always from the same character, each section changes how it is presented: on one section the narrator is always referred to as "the boy", the next it could be "he", "I" or even "you". Although it made the story harder to grasp and slightly uncomfortable to read, it was an interesting narrative device, which I felt gave the story a rather dreamlike character, fitting the unreliability of the narrator.
Despite that, the lack of narrative complexity I expected, and the ending I felt was unusually abrupt, I enjoyed reading the book.
