All Names
Jose Saramago,
Publisher: Panther
ISBN: 1860467202
DDC: 813
Edition: Paperback; 2000-06-01
Summary:
"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
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