All the Names by Jose Saramago
A couple of years ago I read a bizarre, extraordinary novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago titled Blindness. That book, which depicted the consequences of a plague of blindness descending upon an entire city, has since been made into an apparently mediocre film. Much of what struck me as most unusual about that wonderful book, the fabulous imaginings, the strangely sparse punctuation, turn out to be trademarks of much of Saramago's fiction.
Unfortunately, these stylistic calling cards, particularly the long unbroken paragraphs and lack of quotation marks (dialogue is divided only by commas), seem to deter many prospective readers or confuse otherwise intrepid ones. This is shame because a novel like All the Names, while unusual in form, is reasonably accessible in substance.
The story's protagonist is Senhor José, a clerk at the unnamed city's Central Registry, a government office that tracks the birth, death, and marriage of every person on individual record cards (José's last name is a mystery; it is surely no coincidence that the author's own last name was actually his father's nickname, mistakenly recorded as a surname by, you guessed it, the registrar). As one might imagine, the collection of records is unceasingly growing; the cards are segregated between living and dead, with the files for the newly deceased removed and taken to the farthest reaches of the preposterously expanding vault:
The papers pertaining to those no longer alive are to be found in a more or less organised state in the rear of the building, the back wall of which, from time to time, has to be demolished and rebuilt some yards farther on as a consequence of the unstoppable rise in the number of the deceased.
In addition to its wondrously archaic archives, the Central Registry also features a rigidly hierarchical personnel system, which manifests itself physically in the office. The eight clerks sit in a row of desks facing the customer service counter; behind them is a row of four desks for the senior clerks, then a row of two desks for the deputy registrars, followed by the Registrar himself. Furthermore, communication is only to be made by members of adjacent levels; thus the clerks never speak to the deputies or Registrar, and any messages they receive come through the senior clerks. The allocation of work should ring familiar to anyone who has worked in a government office:
The distribution of tasks among the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means that the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas the senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.
Senhor José is by all appearances a diligent clerk, and perhaps the lack of promotion during his decades of service can be explained by the dearth of advancement opportunities. Though at one time all Registry employees lived in homes adjoining the Registry building, all but José's have been torn down. Senhor José has a single hobby that fills his free time: he collects clippings about local celebrities. Harmless enough at first, the hobby takes a provocative turn when he realizes his collection lacks some of the most basic information he has access to: the celebrities' Registry files. Using the long-abandoned door that leads directly from his home to the Registry, José begins making copies of the celebrities' records, until one fateful day when he brings back more than intended:
The card belongs to a woman of thirty-six, born in that very city, and there are two entries, one for marriage, the other for divorce. There must be hundreds, if not thousands of such cards in the index system, so it's hard to understand why Senhor José should be looking at it so strangely, in a way which, at first sight, seems intent, but which is also vague and troubled, perhaps this is the look of someone who, without making any conscious choice, is gradually losing his grip on something and has yet to find another handhold.
José quickly becomes more curious about this utterly unknown woman than by all the famous people to whom he had been devoted. From the basic information available on the card, José embarks on a curious quest to learn more about the woman, perhaps even meet her. This endeavor quickly takes on the aura of obsession, and the clerk gradually casts aside the structure of law and regulation that had previously governed his life. The adventure that follows, with José traveling to the apartment building the woman was born in, the school she attended, a pharmacy near her last school-age home, could in other hands easily seem boorish, even predatory.
Saramago shapes it into a vivid tale of modern alienation, a current that runs throughout his bibliography. The loneliness of the protagonist is obvious, with his scarce social interaction beyond the staccato encounters at work. But note also the inferred isolation of the unknown woman, whose life is depicted through the spare, clinical biographical details offered by the administrative records that survive us all.
