The Review of Contemporary Fiction

All the Names by José Saramango
Brian Evenson

José Saramago. All the Names. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. Harcourt, 2000. 238 pp. $24.00.

All the Names is the story of Senhor José, a largely solitary and blandly consistent clerk employed on the lowest rung of the city’s Central Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths. Having no life, no connections outside of his job, José entertains himself by collecting newspaper clippings, keeping track of the most notorious and most photographed celebrities. One day, by accident, he stumbles upon the birth certificate of an unknown woman. He becomes obsessed with discovering all he can about her, though it puts his job and his life at risk. The Central Registry, a massive and labyrinthine building in which researchers must hold to a thread or become lost, seems a setting lifted from Kafka. Indeed many of the elements that appear in The Trial are to be found here: a seemingly anonymous clerkish bureaucracy, an arcane hierarchy with rigid etiquette, a stifling mass of records, a sense of the irrepressible weight of all that remains unavailable to the central character. Yet, finally, All the Names moves toward a (sometimes tenuous) sense of human connection that Kafka would eschew. As José follows the thread of the unknown woman’s life, making connections he has always shied away from, he gradually discovers how little can be known about anyone, including oneself. But rather than leading him to despair, such discoveries open his life up in ways he cannot imagine.

Stylistically, All the Names employs the devices of Saramago’s earlier work: multiclaused and sinuous sentences in long paragraphs, with little done to set off the difference between narration and quoted speech. The novel has many of the strengths of Saramago’s most compelling novel, Blindness, yet while Blindness has a velocity and brilliance in its first half never quite equalled in the second, All the Names manages to sustain its force to the end. Symbolically permeating the line between life and death, All the Names is Saramago at his most compassionate and least sentimental, at his very best. [Brian Evenson]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction All the Names by José Saramango Brian Evenson José Saramago. All the Names. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. Harcourt, 2000. 238 pp. $24.00. All the Names is the story of Senhor José, a largely solitary and blandly consistent clerk employed on the lowest rung of the city’s Central Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths. Having no life, no connections outside of his job, José entertains himself by collecting newspaper clippings, keeping track of the most notorious and most photographed celebrities. One day, by accident, he stumbles upon the birth certificate of an unknown woman. He becomes obsessed with discovering all he can about her, though it puts his job and his life at risk. The Central Registry, a massive and labyrinthine building in which researchers must hold to a thread or become lost, seems a setting lifted from Kafka. Indeed many of the elements that appear in The Trial are to be found here: a seemingly anonymous clerkish bureaucracy, an arcane hierarchy with rigid etiquette, a stifling mass of records, a sense of the irrepressible weight of all that remains unavailable to the central character. Yet, finally, All the Names moves toward a (sometimes tenuous) sense of human connection that Kafka would eschew. As José follows the thread of the unknown woman’s life, making connections he has always shied away from, he gradually discovers how little can be known about anyone, including oneself. But rather than leading him to despair, such discoveries open his life up in ways he cannot imagine. Stylistically, All the Names employs the devices of Saramago’s earlier work: multiclaused and sinuous sentences in long paragraphs, with little done to set off the difference between narration and quoted speech. The novel has many of the strengths of Saramago’s most compelling novel, Blindness, yet while Blindness has a velocity and brilliance in its first half never quite equalled in the second, All the Names manages to sustain its force to the end. Symbolically permeating the line between life and death, All the Names is Saramago at his most compassionate and least sentimental, at his very best. [Brian Evenson]

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