[.ca] All the Names (ISBN 0156010593)

From Amazon.com:
"As soon as you cross the threshold, you notice the smell of old paper." The Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths is the setting for All the Names, Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago's seventh novel to be translated into English. The names in question are those of every man, woman, and child ever born, married, or buried in the unnamed city where the Registry is located, and are the special province of Senhor José who is employed there as a clerk. Over the centuries, the paper trail in this hopelessly arcane bureaucracy has grown so monumental, so disorganized that one poor researcher became lost in the labyrinthine catacombs of the archive of the dead, having come to the Central Registry in order to carry out some genealogical research he had been commissioned to undertake. He was discovered, almost miraculously, after a week, starving, thirsty, exhausted, delirious, having survived thanks to the desperate measure of ingesting enormous quantities of old documents that neither lingered in the stomach nor nourished, since they melted in the mouth without requiring any chewing. The nondescript Senhor José labors long and thanklessly among the archives; his is a tepid, lonely life with only one small hobby to leaven his leisure hours: he collects "news items about those people in his country who, for good reasons and bad, had become famous." One night, it occurs to him that "something fundamental was missing from his collection, that is, the origin, the root, the source, in other words, the actual birth certificate of these famous people"--and that the information is within easy reach on the other side of a connecting door that separates his meager lodgings from the Registry itself. And so begins Senhor José's midnight raids on the stacks as he shuttles between the Registry and his own room bearing precious records that he carefully copies before returning them to their rightful places. Still, this minor aberration might have remained the clerk's only transgression if not for a simple act of fate: one night, along with his celebrity records, he accidentally picks up a birth certificate belonging to an ordinary, unknown woman--a woman who becomes suddenly more important than all the others precisely because she is unknown. Celebrity is cast aside as Senhor José begins a search for this mysterious quarry--a quest that will lead him into conflict with his superior, the Registrar, and ensnare him in the kind of messy personal histories and tangled relationships he has thus far avoided in his own life. A recurring theme in many of Saramago's novels is the very human struggle between withdrawal and connection. Whether it is the Iberian peninsula literally breaking off from the rest of Europe in The Stone Raft or an entire country afflicted by a devastating malady in Blindness, he is fascinated by the effects of isolation on the human soul and, correspondingly, the redemptive power of compassion. All the Names continues to mine this rich vein as the repressed clerk follows his unknown Ariadne's thread out of the labyrinth of his own strangled psyche and into life. Readers will find here Saramago's trademark love of the absurd, his brilliant imagery and idiosyncratic punctuation, as well as the unflinching yet tender honesty with which he chronicles the human condition. --Alix Wilber

Lovely meditation on life and community.:
"All The Names" is a lovely and masterly meditation on life and living everyday (1994). It questions whether one life is more valuable than another, or whether one person can truly know another, in our disconnected modern world of the Information Age. Jose Saramago writes in a lovely poetic style (b 1922, Portugal). His phrases wash over the mind like waves caressing a sandy beach. His prose is elegant and confident, his sentences sinuous, and his paragraphs lengthy. It will take a few pages for an unaccustomed reader to become familiar with his style, but enjoyment sets in soon enough, and the effort pays off as you nestle comfortably into Saramago's literary approach. Senhor Jose is a menial clerk at the "Central Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths." All important events are recorded here country-wide, upon a small card for each citizen, stored in a cavernous facility of shelves, ladders, and boxes, with Orwellian proficiency. Jose is so connected to the Registry, he lives in a small attached apartment, with a communicating door to the main building. He is a dreamer, clipping magazines in his spare time for stories about his hundred most famous countrymen. One day he decides to copy these celebrities' data cards, to enhance his collection. He sneaks into the Registry at night with a flashlight, withdrawing to his apartment to copy them, then replaces them afterward. The project terrifies him, not for fear of committing a crime, but of conducting an activity without the direct permission of his supervisors. One night Jose retrieves five "famous" cards, but notices a sixth stuck in his pile: that of an unknown 36-year-old woman. Who is she? Isn't her card just like all the famous ones? Isn't it unfair to think differently of her than of them? Jose becomes obsessed, and decides to investigate her life. He locates her parents, her neighbors, even her primary school, breaking into it ineptly, in order to discover even more records in the paper trail of her life. What does he learn? Do a person's legal records match their human reality? And what will happen to his job? The conclusion of the story is powerful and lovely, devastating but satisfying. Saramago explores skillfully the mystery of life in our modern world, and the meaning of one person to another, relative to the traces of information we leave behind. The writing is masterful and the resolution emotional, but the book is never melodramatic or artificial. The reader can expect a deeply meaningful and affecting work, which is highly recommendable. Having read four of Saramago's more popular works as well, I can say I find "All The Names" arguably the finest gem of his body of work.

Interior Monologue and Senhor Jose':
I am captivated by "All the Names" as are most readers who enjoy the listening to inner most thoughts and musings of the protagonist. I also appreciate being in the room or at the chaaracter's' elbow watching every move. However, I am a bit of a traditionalist and need a few rules, noy many but a few. The point of view which has been "we" or second person has now shifted to first person,I, after the second visit to the woman in the apartment. the tense has shifted fro past to present a number of times. The use of the period at the end of a sentence seems to me to be used randomly. Of course there are no quotation marks used to indicate dialogue or speaker. I assume this is a combination of interior monologue, stream of consciousness, omnicient narrator, and style. Has anyone else commented on this? I have not been able to find any reviews that mention this very open, but fluid style of writing. Thanks.

Disarming simplicity, surreal, sometimes absurd:
Saramago's stories have a disarming simplicity that makes them unlike anyone else's. He is the modern Kafka and "All the Names" really shows that inspiration. I would say this is one of the lesser novels by a great writer. There just isn't as much at stake for the main character in this story and the novel lacked the full impact of "Blindness." "All the Names" explores themes of isolation, tradition and bureaucracy with insight and grace. At times its situations become absurd (as in life) but the characters remain realistic throughout. This novel is unique and the story is one well worth reading.

A Quiet Gem of a Book:
Except for the much-neglected book THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, I think ALL THE NAMES is Jose Saramago's most melancholy and meditative novel. It's a simpler, more straightforward story than THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, but one that certainly carries as much depth. ALL THE NAMES is set in an unnamed city that is surely Lisbon. Just as the locale is not specifically named, neither are the characters save for one, the protagonist, Senhor Jose, a low level clerk in the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. The filing system in the Central Registry is such that the records of the dead are stored closest to the clerks and are, therefore, more accessible, while those of the living are stored farthest away. Senhor Jose has but one hobby with which to fill his dull and boring days. He collects press clippings about famous persons and then checks their records to annotate his clippings with facts about their birth, marriages, etc. One evening while indulging his hobby (I hesitate to call it a passion), Senhor Jose mistakenly opens the record of an unknown woman, a woman with whom he becomes obsessed. ALL THE NAMES is a book that begins slowly, but picks up the pace as Senhor Jose searches for the nameless woman. Sitting in his room, which adjoins the registry, Senhor Jose stares at the ceiling and converses with it. Incredibly, the ceiling sees itself as the all-knowing eye of God. Senhor Jose's dialogues with the ceiling and his trip to the General Cemetery contain the book's most magnificent writing, writing that is, at times, quite hallucinatory and baroque, something I really liked. I think ALL THE NAMES is worth reading simply for the "ceiling" and "cemetery" set pieces alone. Although ALL THE NAMES doesn't have the power of BLINDNESS or the baroque complexity of THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, it is still a masterpiece and its theme, unlike that of THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS or THE HISTORY OF THE SIEGE OF LISBON, while still revolving around identity, is more universally understood. If you're new to the work of Jose Saramago, ALL THE NAMES might be a good place to begin. If you've only read his more popular works, like BLINDNESS and THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST, and you liked those books, then you really can't afford to pass up ALL THE NAMES. It is a quiet gem of a book and you're in for a real treat.

"The workings of chance are infinite.":
Senhor Jose has worked as a civil servant in the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths for twenty-five years. When not working he engages in his covert hobby of collecting articles and photographs of celebrities and supplementing them with vital statistics from his office. While secretly extracting index cards from a file in the Central Registry he comes across a card of an unknown non-celebrity woman that is the catalyst for the journey at the center of ALL THE NAMES. Fascinated by the circumstances of the Unknown Woman's life Senhor Jose engages in a clandestine operation of trying to find her whereabouts. Jose Saramago performs a splendid job of getting into the head of Senhor Jose by highlighting the deductions of internal thought and inquiry and protecting scenarios of anticipated dialogue with others, as demonstrated by his internal dialogues with the ceiling in his house. Saramago's method resulted in a highly enjoyable and nuanced protagonist that is believable and three-dimensional. While reading ALL THE NAMES it is apparent that Saramago's communist beliefs are projected in this novel by the descriptions of the Central Registry by including descriptions of the strict hierarchy of employees and the maximum efficiency of work processes. Even when Senhor Jose goes to another workplace the same structure is accentuated. ALL THE NAMES is one of my favorite novels by Jose Saramago and was a real treat to read.