All the Names

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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: Love and the Unknown Woman
Review: 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.

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Summary: Interior Monologue and Senhor Jose'
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Not His Best
Review: I give this book 4 stars on the "Saramago Scale". By the standards of contemporary fiction, this book is phenomenal. By Saramago's standards, it's not quite up to par.

The book involves the adventure of Senhor Jose, a low-level functionary in a state bureaucrat of The Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Senhor Jose, who lives in a meager house attached to the Registry, becomes obsessed with collecting the birth records of "famous" individuals, and thus begins a series of midnight excursions into the Registry. One night, along with the celebrity birth records, he stantches a copy of an ordinary woman's birth certificate, and quickly begins a compulsive quest to learn the details of the woman's life.

This book is ripping good to read, yet does not meet the standards of Saramago's earlier works (especially ripe for comparison is The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). In Ricardo Reis, Saramago focused on issues of personal identity by ingeniously having a pseudonym communicate with a dead poet, all the while exploring the poetic notion that "I am innumerable people". All the Names explores the same theme far more heavy handedly: instead of a brilliant poetic vehicle, or a clever plot construct, Saramago here explores identity through the rather hackneyed device of anonymity and obscurity (a sort of long-winded Kafka, if you will). And this is generally the case--All the Names is far less original a work than Saramago's early novels, and far more dependent on modernist European literature.

Again, this is not to say this is a bad read. Anybody who enjoyed Saramago's other novels should be sure to check out this Kafkaesque, Borgesesque dark wonder. However, if you expect a second Ricardo Reis (or Blindness for that matter), you will probably be disappointed.

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Summary: One big run-on sentence...
Review: I think this book has six, maybe seven periods in the whole book.

Ok, so I might be exaggerating. However, I literally counted eight pages between two periods. This entire book is one long run-on sentence. If I had written this way in my college courses, I would have received an appropriate failing grade.

Besides being incredibly difficult to read (because you keep wanting to insert a period) the plot of the book is nearly non-existent and develops slowly, and utterly fails to hold the reader's interest.

I will NOT be recommending this novel to my friends or family. :-)


Rating:
Summary: A Book of Many Themes
Review: I was made aware of Jose Saramago after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years back. "All the Names" is the first book of his that I have read. I admit that, despite the mere 238 pages, I was put off by the pages-long paragraphs. Saramago has his own way of putting his words together and, as I found out, he doesn't use quotation marks. However, once I started reading the book, I became at ease with these peculiarities and found his style rather easy to follow.

This is a book about a lot of things and I suspect many more than I picked up on. For me the theme was the anonymity of people in todays society. We focus our attention on the celebrities of the world at the expense of the lonely person down the street. The main character in "All the Names", Senhor Jose, is a man who works in a large government office. His job is to assist is keeping track of the vital statistics of the people, past and present, of his political division. The book and character reminded me a lot of Ismail Kadare's "The Palace of Dreams". As in that book, the main character goes against the grain and discovers things in the process. His passion is collecting information about celebreties. In the process of looking over his clippings, he realized that he had obtained an information card about some common, unknown citizen. He began to wonder just who this person is and that curiosity evolved into a compulsion. His clandestine investigation serves as the bulk of the story. His curiosity about an unknown fellow citizen makes a mystery out of the seemingly commonplace. Therein was the crux of the story as I understood it; we are surrounded by people who all have an interesting story to their lives. However, we bury the multitudes in favor of the rare person of fame. In doing so, we not only grossly overrate the lives of the famous, we end up trivializing our own lives as well.

That's my take on "All the Names" but I could tell that there were many other directions in which this short novel could be interpreted. Saramago's style, peculiarities aside, reminds me a lot of one of my favorite authors; B Traven. Obviously, I will be reading a lot more of Jose Saramago.

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Summary: Thanks Nobel Prize Committee!
Review: If he had never won the Nobel Prize, I would never have heard of Jose Saramago. I have read all of his novels and am captivated by his elegant and beautiful writing. It was with a mixture of hopeful anticipation and dread that I read this book: could it possibly measure up to my favorites Blindness and Baltisar and Blimunda. Well I need not have worried, Saramago drew me into his labyrinth from the first sentence. I was reminded of Kafka and Dante's Inferno when reading this story of a lonely public official Senhor Jose who is isolated by istitutions and his work. He represents all of modern humanity in it's struggle to survive emotionally. The book tells of Senhor Jose's attempt to find connections to other human beings, of having to fight all of the barriers erected by modern life. He is the "everyman" of the Twentieth Century. The glimpses of love that he finds during his obsessive quest is enough to transform him into another person. Read the book very slowly to savor the taste of Saramago's prose. He will be remembered as a great writer in distant times.

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Summary: Evangelical Enthusiasm
Review: In his preface to Douglas Adam's posthumously published collection "The Salmon of Doubt", Stephen Fry makes a rather profound point. He puts forth the theory that, for most of us, when it comes to art, music and literature, there are two types of loves. We can love things for their universality and greatness (he gives the examples of Mozart and Dickens), or we can love them for how they seem to speak to us and us alone (he gives the examples of Bach and Blake). In my experience this is true; I will heartily recommend Jane Austen or Andrew Marvell or Barnett Newman or The Wrens to anyone who asks, but, selfishly perhaps, keep Karoline von Günderrode, Rilke, Rothko, and Xiu Xiu to myself.
This is because, against all evidence, I believe that no one quite `gets' these artists in the way I do. I feel they speak directly to my soul, and that, even if someone else liked them, it wouldn't be in quite the same way.
This book, however, somehow straddles the line. Its retelling of the Theseus and the Minotaur myth (or alternately, its retelling of Kafka's "Before the Law"), somehow manages to transcend the personal and the universal. Senhor José, practically the only character in the text, begins the story as a cipher and ends it as a hero. His descent into madness and unreason is mirrored by his ascent into what Heidegger would have called a Dasein. He becomes both a metaphor for human experience and a full, distinct and `real' character.
Other reviews on this site will supply you with the plot details, so I will not burden you with those, but will merely, evangelistically, implore you to read this book. It is as personal as it is universal, and really, how often can you read a book where a ceiling refers to itself and its peers as `the multiple eyes of god'? I'm betting not too often. As humorous as it is melancholy, and as playful as it is relevant, this book is one to be treasured and recommended.


Rating:
Summary: A beautiful, brilliant book
Review: Saramago's in depth, tender and frequently humorous exploration of the life of a simple, timid clerk (Senhor Jose) unfolds into a story of a man's quest to overcome the fears that have all but smothered him. "Senhor Jose both wants and doesn't want, he both desires and fears what he desires, that is what his whole life has been like," Saramago tells us. Other than his "hobby," collecting information about famous people, Senhor Jose's life is mostly about being as uninvolved as possible.

In contrast to the main character in Saramago's earlier "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis," who is dead but doesn't know it, Senhor Jose is alive but doesn't know it. And unlike his earlier works in which fate seems to hold all the cards, in "All the Names" Saramago lets chance (serendipity) guide the story. It begins, almost as a reward for a tiny bit of daring, when Senhor Jose sneaks into his work place to get some more information about famous people for his collection and discovers, stuck to one of the records he was looking for, a misfiled record for a woman (another un-famous, unknown). Unbeknownst to him at the time, it will be the question posed by this simple piece of paper (Who is she?) that brings Senhor Jose "back from the dead." Skillfully, Saramago uses the same question to draw in his readers, and it is some time before he begins to let on that maybe this "unknown woman" is more important as a metaphor for what has become of Senhor Jose's spirit - his willingness to engage in life - than as some real woman he will eventually find. In the end, it is the search itself that eventually leads Senhor Jose to discover that what makes life worth living is never so dead that it can't be resurrected.

There is a shift in "quality" (character) between this book and Saramago's earlier ones. "All the Names" is not about politics, history or culture; it is focused on the psychology and spirit of the human experience. Saramago is such a brilliant observer of the inner life. His ability to write from within his characters (as opposed to about them), while clear in his earlier works, is taken to a new level in "All the Names." The many occasions in which Saramago lets us know what Senhor Jose is thinking (be it silly or sublime, ridiculous or profound) are written so well that it is hard not to feel that you know this character as well as you know yourself.

It is significant that Saramago never says where the story takes place and he gives no one but the main character a name -- and it could be Mr. Smith or John Doe for all it matters. Although Saramago has written this book as if it were about "someone in some place," what he has created is in fact a story for anyone in any place, even you in your place. There is a more than a little Senhor Jose in all of us.

(A note for those who are new to Saramago's writing): Saramago's writing style is, I think, an acquired taste. He has little regard for punctuation and slips easily into "stream of conscious" wanderings (more accurately, what appear to be wanderings but eventually add to the whole experience -- like unexpected dashes of some spice that no on one in their right mind would think of using but everyone would miss come dinner time had they been omitted). If I could claim to know a universally fool proof method for reading Saramago it would be this: sometimes you have to listen to the reading voice in your head as if it were someone reading the story to you aloud. As Saramago was blessed with a grandfather who would stay up at night telling him about life (and all the stories that entails), I think that his writing voice can be attributed to (and is a tribute to) his grandfather's speaking voice.

Rating:
Summary: Disarming simplicity, surreal, sometimes absurd
Review: 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.