Customer Reviews

All the Names

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As with most of Saramago's work, "All the Names" resolves itself in a rather disconcerting way. With simple language that often disguises the true depth of his meaning, the author builds up the story with great skill, leading the reader to believe that some calamitous event is inevitable. That the narrative goes down unexpected paths without disappointing is a testament to the author's brilliance.

It also speaks to the nature of the universal themes that Saramago tackles with unmatched skill. As we ponder the fate of the protagonist we wonder about ourselves. About our own temerity or bravery, as it were. About our willingness to take that step past the door that divides the safety zone of the known self to the tortuous path of self discovery. How would I proceed in situation identical to Senhor Jose's, the reader is compelled to ask.

Senhor Jose, the protagonist, embodies the thing within each of us, be it a flicker or weighty desire, which propels us to decide whether we want to know more about ourselves. Even if that trigger comes disguised as a quest for a different purpose. At the start of his quest, Senhor Jose is seeking answers about someone else, but his ultimate discoveries are about himself. The protagonist gets himself deeper and deeper, and like an addict he keeps telling himself he can abandon his quest at any point, but both he and the reader know that the deeper he gets the more powerless he becomes to do anything but to see his mission through. There is an undercurrent of inevitability, of being part of a machinery over which an individual has little, if any, control.

With economy, elegance and simplicity, Saramago takes through the winding paths of the human psyche. Other books worthy of mention by this author are his masterpiece "Blindness" and "The Stone Raft."

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Henry David Thoreau famously observed that most people "lead lives of quiet desperation." Thoreau could well have been speaking of Senhor Jose, the main character in Saramongo's fine novel, "All the Names". Senhor Jose, age 50, is a clerk in the National Registry of a large, unidentified, city. His job is to record deaths, births, marriages, divorces on official documents covering the living and the dead of the city. The work is dull and routine. Senhor Jose is a confirmed bachelor, stuck in his habits, with no friends. He amuses himself by clipping newspaper articles and other information on famous people.

In the course of pursuing his hobby, Senhor Jose comes across the record of a 36 year old woman who has recently divorced. The novel turns upon Senhor Jose's attempt to find this woman and upon his motivation for doing so.

The story is told in a surrealistic, allegorical, Kafkaesque way. It is written in long, unbroken sentences and paragraphs which do not stop for details such as quotation marks. This style is effective because it allows the reader to enter into Senhor Jose's mind and into the minds of the many characters he encounters along the way of his search. The tone of the writing varies from sharply ironic to deeply serious and reflective. There is also a startling change of voicing in the book from third to first person in one pivotal passage which is not fully explained until the end of the story.

The novel is one of spiritual seeking with many astonishing characters assisting Senhor Jose in his quest. The characters include the Registrar at the National Registry, a Shepherd at a cemetry, and the ceiling (!) in Senhor Jose's apartment.

I found the story moving in its description of the need for human love and connectedness. Near the end of the book, Senhor Jose discusses the nature of his quest for the unknown woman. He is told that he loves her even though she is a person he has never met: "You wanted to see her, you wanted to know her, and that, whether you like it or not, is love." (p. 211) At the very end of the book, Senhor Jose himself observes, in discussing the activities of the shepherd at the cemetery in rearranging identification markers on tombstones: "it's all to do with knowing where the people we're looking for really are, he thinks we'll never know." (p. 237)

In his strange quest, Senhor Jose, and the reader, have learned something of the mystery of human love, and of the connection that binds the living and the dead.

Senhor José's life is nothing but ordinary: in an unnamed city he works as a lowly clerk for the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Death where the living and dead permanently share the same shelf in a single archive. In his early fifties, José has a laudable modesty of those who do not go around complaining about the voluminous workload befallen him. He attempts his work sedulously, with great precision and sense of responsibility, despite his suffering from vertigo caused by a fear of height when he climbs the ladder to access files on ceiling-to-floor shelves.

Senhor José finds solace in collecting news clippings of the country's famous, notorious and elite. One night, seized by an impulse and despondence over the inadequacy of his collection, José scuttles across the threshold of the communicating door that parts his lodging from the Registry and pilfers from the file drawer five precious records cards of the famous people. No sooner has he finished copying carefully and returned the cards to their rightful places than he spots the extra card, the unwanted one that belongs to an unknown, ordinary woman. Until then José's tepid and quiet life is no longer the same as he becomes morbidly obsessed with this unknown woman.

What follows is our protagonist's exhaustive (and somehow preposterous) quest for the unknown woman through the clues that trail behind from the record cards: her most recent address, her last records from school, her neighbor from 33 years ago, and her parents. His anxiety and curiosity for this unknown woman tightens the grip to the point he doesn't feel right to resign himself. The obsession of the search in no time takes its toll. It inevitably manifests in mistakes at work, in lack of attention, in wane of precision, in sudden bouts of drowsiness during the day. The Registrar deems such poor standard of work can only be justified by some grave illness. Little does the Registrar know that José's irrepressible trembling is not the result of illness but panic, as he has committed an offense against the ethics of the Registry-infringement of privacy and forgery of credentials.

I'll most certainly leave the readers to learn the outcome of José's investigation. One common theme has surfaced in this novel. Like Saramago's other books such as Blindness, The Stone Raft and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, the notion of loneliness (isolation vs. connection) prevails and governs the shaping of Saramago's characters and the actions they take. José is a loner who only takes interest in people's birth certificate. Those whom he encounters and indebted upon, especially the woman who lives on the ground floor, suffers from loneliness as she purposely engages in a circuitous conversation with José since she has nobody to talk to. José's peers at work, who treats him with scornful commiseration, as they are jealous at the Registrar's unmerited favoritism toward José upon his recovery from illness, are lonely as well.

A sound quote from the book has always resonated in my mind, "I don't believe one can show greater respect than to weep for a stranger." (205) All The Names evokes the moment of recognition in the lives of the living and dead. Through the search for this woman to whom José has neither a personal or sentimental attachment, Saramago evokes in us the unbeatable and redemptive power of compassion, something that surpasses life and death and the vast interval of time that separates us from the most remote dead.

Saramago's writing is thought provoking as usual, richly marinated with philosophical overtones such as "[registry] routine presupposes unconscious certainty" and "we do not make decisions, decisions make us." (29) Throughout the book José engages in some importunate inner fantasy dialogues as well as conversation with the plaster ceiling. This book is not to be taken lightly. The richness and obscurity of the prose forbid you to rush through it but to let it seep through slowly. The shift in prose styling (from more taut, crisp and direct prose to a slightly more sating prose with cumbersome sentences) from Blindness and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis makes All The Names a more difficult, arduous read. The embedded paragraphs and the omission of punctuation are signatures of Saramago that require readers to practice some patience. The premise of the story is still tantalizing but not quite up to par to the aforementioned titles. 4.2 stars.

This book has a slow start, but the half-magical/half-practical world Saramago creates in this book is once again amazing.

... you'll love All the Names as well.

All the names is the story of a poor bureaucrat working at the Central Registry, where all births, deaths, marriages and divorces are recorded. Having seemingly no social life to speak of, Senhor José spends his leisure time collecting news item clippings about famous people. One day, he runs across the birth certificate of an unknown woman, and becomes obsessed with finding out everything about this woman. This is the main thrust of the novel, written in Saramago's particular style.

The story just sweeps you along from page to page, never letting you want to put the book down.

I recommend it to all Saramago fans, and also to those wanting to discover this great novelist.