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Title: All the Names by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0-15-100421-8 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 05 October, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.45 (42 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Thanks Nobel Prize Committee!
Comment: 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.
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.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Quiet Gem of a Book
Comment: Except for the much-neglected book THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, I think ALL THE NAMES is Jose Saramago's most melancholy and meditative novel. It's a simpler, more straightforward story than THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, but one that certainly carries as much depth.
ALL THE NAMES is set in an unnamed city that is surely Lisbon. Just as the locale is not specifically named, neither are the characters save for one, the protagonist, Senhor Jose, a low level clerk in the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths.
The filing system in the Central Registry is such that the records of the dead are stored closest to the clerks and are, therefore, more accessible, while those of the living are stored farthest away.
Senhor Jose has but one hobby with which to fill his dull and boring days. He collects press clippings about famous persons and then checks their records to annotate his clippings with facts about their birth, marriages, etc. One evening while indulging his hobby (I hesitate to call it a passion), Senhor Jose mistakenly opens the record of an unknown woman, a woman with whom he becomes obsessed.
ALL THE NAMES is a book that begins slowly, but picks up the pace as Senhor Jose searches for the nameless woman. Sitting in his room, which adjoins the registry, Senhor Jose stares at the ceiling and converses with it. Incredibly, the ceiling sees itself as the all-knowing eye of God. Senhor Jose's dialogues with the ceiling and his trip to the General Cemetery contain the book's most magnificent writing, writing that is, at times, quite hallucinatory and baroque, something I really liked. I think ALL THE NAMES is worth reading simply for the "ceiling" and "cemetery" set pieces alone.
Although ALL THE NAMES doesn't have the power of BLINDNESS or the baroque complexity of THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, it is still a masterpiece and its theme, unlike that of THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS or THE HISTORY OF THE SIEGE OF LISBON, while still revolving around identity, is more universally understood.
If you're new to the work of Jose Saramago, ALL THE NAMES might be a good place to begin. If you've only read his more popular works, like BLINDNESS and THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST, and you liked those books, then you really can't afford to pass up ALL THE NAMES. It is a quiet gem of a book and you're in for a real treat.
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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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