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Summary: All the names: all the magic literature can offer
Review: "All the names" is a great book. I want to make that a statement: it is a real great book, one of the best I have ever read.There is a richness, a deepness, a "presence", in the whole narration that can be sensed, that almost can be touched; something rare and wonderful. If that was not enough (though I think it is), the plot is, besides, simple and compelling at the same time. Maybe "simple" is not the right word, though, because it may give you a wrong impression. More than simple, the plot is somewhat stern, clean, brilliant. There are no tricks in "All the names", no sleights of hands or absurd turns. The narration grows, changes, as the main character, "o senhor José", changes and grows himself. Both of them, the character and the narration, are the same thing, a thing that breaths, and lives, and thinks; that has hopes, and dreams, and fears. I really cannot describe "All the names", all its intensity, all the strength, wisdom and honesty that it reflects. I just can tell you to read it.
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Summary: Lovely meditation on life and community.
Review: "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.
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Summary: A matter of life and death.
Review: "I felt something like a shock in my soul, a tremor in my heart," Jose Saramago's protagonist, Senhor Jose, observes in this tale of personal transformation, "and even now, now that it's morning, and many hours have passed, while I finish writing up the events of the day in my notebook, I look at my right hand and it seems different to me, although I can't quite say how; it must be an internal rather than an external matter" (p. 169). Senhor Jose is a middle-aged bachelor, "a subaltern, a subordinate, a dependent, a manservant, an errand boy" (p. 203) and a low-level clerk in the Central Registry of vital records in some unknown city. He is an everyman, and over the course of this 238-page novel, he travels through a bureaucratic labyrinth of the living and the dead, in his search of an ordinary, unknown woman. His hero's journey from human isolation to compassion leads him not only into conflict with his superiors, but ultimately to metaphysical truths revealed under "mysterious moonlight" in a "strange cemetery," a "gathering of silences that, from one moment to the next, might begin to scream" (p. 198). Published in 1997, the year before he won the Nobel Prize, ALL THE NAMES shows Saramago at the heighths of his talent. In Senhor Jose's lonely quest for human connection, Saramago combines all the themes of his most recent novels. This novel will haunt you. G. Merritt
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Summary: If you loved Blindness ...
Review: ... 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.
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Summary: It won't pick you up and shake you like "Blindness", but...
Review: ..read it anyway. If you are a fan of Jose Saramago - you will enjoy "All the Names". This book never takes off with the crazy fervor of "Blindess", but it is so well written and so insightful, that you can't put it down none-the-less. I think anyone who has ever worked in an "office setting" can relate to this man and his feelings of insignificance. In the corporate world - we're all just numbers.
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Summary: Unusual style, but beautiful
Review: All the Names is about loneliness and humanity. The novel follows the obsession of a single 50-year old clerk, and explores his fears and his meaningess life. While the topic/plot sounds really depressing, Saramago manages to infuse the novel with warm feeling of compassion and empathy. Saramago's prose requires some getting used to--long paragraphs without any separation between narative and dialogue, sentences separated only by commas. However, once you get used to it, you don't notice and appreciate the flow. For those readers who have read Gogol's "Overcoat" All the Names can be a refreshing take on a similar subject.
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Summary: An obsession
Review: All The Names is the second novel I have read from Saramago (the first one was Blindness).This book is basically a very peculiar (and very sad) love story. It is also the story of an obsession. Senhor Jose gets to know some details of a woman's life through official documents and it is evident this is not a common way to fall in love. Parallel to the main story there is also a lot of irony with respect to bureaucracy, bureaucrats, jerarquies, authority and obedience. It is a merciless novel. There are no concessions to the characters. It is set in a realistic yet fabulous world. It reveals a lot of the intimacy of Senhor Jose and the character becomes powerfully real, credible, pathetic and tender. Definetively an excellent novel.
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Summary: A thoroughly okay book
Review: An anonymous bureaucrat. A bleak world. A giant, powerful bureaucracy with an unpredictable and omnipotent authority figure. Surreal events. Undefined desire. Sound familiar? It's Kafka! The book was well-written, sparse, tense, bleak, but...somehow it feels redundant and passé. It doesn't feel genuine. It doesn't feel real - yes, it's an allegory, I understand that, but allegories feel real because they create a surreal or overly real universe that connects to the reader's current condition. Yes! you say, as you read, By golly! To me, today's culture isn't threatening us with bleakness, boredom, and alienation. We're not estranged from our humanity by drudgery, by huge, faceless nameless government organizations. No. Today we are in danger of saturation. We are bombarded daily by brain candy. There are more movies, books, magazines, and games now than ever before. There are computers and the Internet. There is fast food, online food, supermarkets, and mini-markets. Every individual need is catered to. We are alienated by our distractions. In that light, books like Lem's "The Futurological Congress," Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," and DeLillo's "White Noise" do a much better job of commenting on our culture, our values. But Saramago's a good writer. A very good writer. And this book is definitely...okay.
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Summary: A study in self-discovery
Review: 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."
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Summary: A Quiet Gem of a Book
Review: 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.
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