false<![CDATA[All the Names]]>http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1161054078m/2528.jpg252825"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 <I>All the Names</I>, 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 <I>is</I> 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 <I>The Stone Raft</I> or an entire country afflicted by a devastating malady in <I>Blindness</I>, he is fascinated by the effects of isolation on the human soul and, correspondingly, the redemptive power of compassion. <I>All the Names</I> 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.
<I>--Alix Wilber</I>1030699book2000All the Namestotal:1981|5:544|4:745|3:495|2:152|1:42|19817545283222333falsefalseMon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007Mon Oct 29 13:46:00 -0700 2007Wed Nov 14 16:28:37 -0800 2007 Except I found myself having to take numerous breaks from this one. While Saramago starts out with an interesting subject on...more...]]>
53falsefalseMon Nov 01 00:00:00 -0800 2004Thu Nov 22 19:40:18 -0800 2007Thu Nov 22 23:36:03 -0800 2007
All the Names, a gorgeously written and captivating allegorical tale of identity penned by the illustrious José Saramago, which concerns the seemingly mundane life of Senhor José, a lowly ...more...]]>
52falsefalseFri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007Mon Sep 10 16:20:11 -0700 2007Mon Sep 10 16:24:19 -0700 2007 i adore this one because there's no "love interest" and because of saramago's unbelievable ability to effortlessly pop breathtaking statements about humanit...more...]]>
31falsetrueMon Apr 21 12:28:16 -0700 2008Sat Jul 12 05:42:01 -0700 2008
more...]]>
51falsefalseTue Sep 16 16:26:42 -0700 2008Thu Sep 11 15:52:29 -0700 2008Tue Sep 16 16:26:42 -0700 2008
more...]]>
51falsefalseFri Jul 20 16:07:15 -0700 2007Fri Jul 20 16:18:18 -0700 2007 The prose ...more...]]>
41falsefalseWed Jul 30 00:00:00 -0700 2008Tue Jul 22 14:02:37 -0700 2008Wed Jul 30 06:40:37 -0700 2008
more...]]>
31falsefalseSat Dec 27 00:00:00 -0800 2008Sat Dec 20 03:07:36 -0800 2008Sat Dec 27 17:37:54 -0800 2008
This is truly one of the most interesting and unique storylines that I have read to date. As a result, I did not want the story to end, and when it did, I h...more...]]>
51falsefalseFri Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2006Sun Jan 27 09:30:22 -0800 2008Sun Jan 27 09:34:41 -0800 2008
more...]]>
41falsefalseFri Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008Thu Mar 13 14:59:55 -0700 2008Thu Mar 13 15:16:33 -0700 2008 It is just me, or did anyone else find the endi...more...]]>
20falsefalseSun Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009Wed Apr 01 12:58:40 -0700 2009Wed Apr 01 12:59:09 -0700 2009 This is a difficult book to like, let alone understand. It’s told from the viewpoint of Senhor Jose (no family name given), who labors as a lowly clerk recording births and deaths in a monstrously named bureaucracy called The Central Registry of Births, Dea...more...]]>
50falsefalseMon Nov 24 16:51:35 -0800 2008Mon Nov 24 16:51:57 -0800 2008
more...]]>
40falsefalseTue Sep 30 00:00:00 -0700 2003Mon Aug 10 13:17:40 -0700 2009Mon Aug 10 13:18:57 -0700 2009
more...]]>
50falsefalseWed Aug 05 08:11:33 -0700 2009Wed Aug 05 08:12:46 -0700 2009 Employés sans visages, tâches absurdes et répétitives, hiérarchie toute puissante qui brime l'individu, tout participe d'un univers concentrationnaire et déshumanisant, brill...more...]]>
51falsefalseFri Oct 26 00:00:00 -0700 2007Sun Jun 21 09:32:58 -0700 2009Mon Jun 22 07:38:51 -0700 2009 I’m sort of happy to report that Todos os Nomes did not end as I expected it might. The ending was, in fact, totally unlike anything that I expected--which is why my happiness is reserved. Although our protagonist Senhor José was apparentl...more...]]>
30falsefalseSat Nov 22 14:35:45 -0800 2008Sat Nov 22 14:50:04 -0800 2008
more...]]>
40falsefalseSat Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009Tue Aug 25 19:38:14 -0700 2009Tue Aug 25 19:53:21 -0700 2009
more...]]>
30falsefalseMon Sep 07 00:00:00 -0700 2009Mon Aug 31 07:07:37 -0700 2009Tue Sep 08 08:38:18 -0700 2009
more...]]>
40falsefalseTue Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009Mon Aug 31 06:36:48 -0700 2009Wed Sep 09 16:24:25 -0700 2009
more...]]>
40falsefalseTue Jul 14 00:00:00 -0700 2009Fri Jun 26 08:23:25 -0700 2009Wed Jul 01 10:36:47 -0700 2009
"There must be hundreds, if not thousands of such cards in the index system, so it's hard to understand why Senhor Jose' should be looking at it so strangely...Senhor Jose' looks and looks again at what is written on the card, the handwri...