All the Names by Jose Saramago

"...but Senhor Jose cannot rid himself of an obsessive thought, that he is the only person who can move the final piece on the board, the definitive piece, the one which, if moved in the right direction, will give real meaning to the game, at the risk, if he does not do so, of leaving the game at stalemate for all eternity."

Pulitzer Prize winning Portuguese author Jose Saramago is no small name in the literary world. All the Names is Saramago's first book since Blindness, the book that brought him the Pulitzer. Let me start off by saying that Saramago's writing style is long-winded through about the entire first half of the book. Sentences range from a paragraph long, to over two pages long. Often this is due to his unique method of using commas instead of quotation marks to denote changes in voice. Surprisingly, this is not as disorienting as it might sound. But onto the story itself...

The protagonist, Senhor Jose, is a loner man on the verge of reaching elderly status who has remained a loner his entire life. He works for the almighty Central Registry, which keeps track of people's births and deaths. Jose's loneliness seems to be substituted with these 'relationships' he builds with famous people that he keeps track of through scrupulous collections of newspaper clippings. His hermetical lifestyle is further underlined by frequent conversations with himself, as well as drawn out imaginings of the fantasy situations his actions might bring about. His obsession with having as much knowledge as possible about each person leads to him sneaking into the Central Registry at night to look at their records. He mistakenly withdraws the record of a random, unknown woman, who leads to his ultimate infatuation.

The rest of the book follows Jose's journey to do whatever it takes to find this woman. He even does the unthinkable by committing illegal acts against the Registry, such as forging documents and informing the people that he corresponds with that he is on 'official' Registry business. Discovering the fate of the woman is not enough for Senhor Jose. He follows her story until it can go no further, exhausting himself physically and mentally.

The comprehensive theme in this book, further brought to focus by the Registrar himself, is the act of connecting the living to the dead. A radical transformation is issued by the Registrar to combine the files of the living and dead, so that the dead are not forgotten (and also so that the clerks do not get so lost between the labyrinthine shelves that they never find their way out and thereby ultimately die). Senhor Jose himself brings the dead to life through his pursuit of the unknown woman.

This book is extremely well-written, although the flow and punctuation warrants a second read-thru to absorb the nuances of Saramago's story. Overall, an engaging book that perhaps makes one feel not quite so bad for stalking people on Facebook...