All the Names

 

All the Names
All the Names
by Authors: Jose Saramago , Margaret Costa
Released: 05 October, 2001
ISBN: 0156010593
Paperback

Sales Rank: 71,625
List price: $14.00
Our price: $10.50 (You save: $3.5)
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All the Names > Customer Review #1:
Thanks Nobel Prize Committee!

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 Dantes 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 its struggle to survive emotionally. The book tells of Senhor Joses 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 Saramagos prose. He will be remembered as a great writer in distant times.

All the Names > Customer Review #2:
Not His Best

I give this book 4 stars on the "Saramago Scale". By the standards of contemporary fiction, this book is phenomenal. By Saramagos standards, its 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 womans birth certificate, and quickly begins a compulsive quest to learn the details of the womans life.

This book is ripping good to read, yet does not meet the standards of Saramagos 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 Saramagos early novels, and far more dependent on modernist European literature.

Again, this is not to say this is a bad read. Anybody who enjoyed Saramagos 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.



All the Names > Customer Review #3:
"The workings of chance are infinite."

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 Womans 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. Saramagos method resulted in a highly enjoyable and nuanced protagonist that is believable and three-dimensional.lt;P>While reading ALL THE NAMES it is apparent that Saramagos 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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