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Title: All the Names by Jose Saramago, Margaret Costa ISBN: 0-15-601059-3 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 05 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.45 (42 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Not His Best
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: A beautiful, brilliant book
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: "The workings of chance are infinite."
Comment: 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.
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Title: Blindness (Harvest Book) by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0156007754 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 04 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Cave by Jose Saramago, Margaret Costa ISBN: 0156028794 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 15 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0156001411 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 28 September, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0156004011 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 14 June, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0156996936 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 27 April, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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