Home | Books By Year | Books from 1997
All the Names
Buy All the Names now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the book. And once you've experienced the book, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'All the Names' is a novel by the Portuguese author Jos Saramago, the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel was written in 1997 and translated into English in 1999 by Margaret Jull Costa, which won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Plot summary
The main setting of the novel is the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths located in an ambiguous and unnamed city. This municipal archive holds the record cards for all of the residents of the city stretching back endlessly into the past.
The protagonist is named Senhor Jos; the only character in the novel to be given a proper name (all of the others are referred to simply by some unique and defining characteristic). Senhor Jos is around fifty years old and has worked as a low-level clerk in the Central Registry for more than two decades. Senhor Jos's residence, where he lives alone, adjoins the municipal building and contains the only side entrance into it. Lost in the tedium of a bureaucratic job, he starts to collect information about various famous people and decides, one evening, to use the side entrance to sneak in and steal their record cards.
On one nocturnal venture Senhor Jos grabs the record card of an "unknown woman" by mistake and quickly becomes obsessed with finding her. Senhor Jos uses his power as a registry clerk to gather information about the "unknown woman" from her past neighbors and, when it is suggested to look her up in a phone book, he ignores the advice, choosing instead to keep his distance.
The search for this woman begins to consume him and affects his work enough so to draw attention from the Registrar head of the Central Registry who, strangely, begins to regard Senhor Jos with sympathy. This special attention given to a clerk by the Registrar is unprecedented in the known history of the Central Registry and begins to worry his fellow employees. Senhor Jos further neglects his duties as a civil servant and risks his career to pursue this "unknown woman" he knows almost nothing about.
Themes
One of the main themes in 'All the Names', highlighted through Senhor Jos's journey in piecing together the life of the unknown woman and the effects she had on the people and things, as well as the registry's conclusion that the living and dead's files should be put together as one, is that in order to be properly looked at, the human condition must include the lives of the living and the dead, the remembered and the forgotten, and the known and unknown. Indeed, this is a recurring theme in Saramago's works.
Another theme is the absurdity of human action. As Saramago puts it:
References
Sources
*
Category:Novels by Jos Saramago
Category:1997 novels
Category:20th-century Portuguese novels
Buy All the Names now from Amazon
<-- Return to books from 1997