As someone who spent 7 years of my life as a “vacuous office clerk” I warmed immediately to the tale of a lowly 50-year-old clerk in a city’s Central Registry, the bureacracy where all births, marriages, divorces, and deaths are registered. Yes, the Central Registry is the repository of All the Names, both of the living and of the dead. Name and vital statistics. What more is there to know about a person?

When Senhor Jose accidently pulls the card of a young woman, her card is caught behind another card, he begins to wonder just that. He must discover more about this anonymous woman who is only a name on a card. This becomes his obsession and his obsession leads him to act as he has never done in his life. He plays detective. He plays the thief. He forges documents.

All the Names is translated from the Portuguese. The writing is very dense, but also elegant and lyrical. The writer in me appreciated it more than the reader in me. Conversations are compressed into long sentences with never a “he said, she said” inserted for clarification. The full stop is abhored and the whimsical approach to punctuation must have driven the proofreaders crazy. Kudos to the translator, Margaret Jull Costa. What an undertaking! What an achievement!

After a slow start with a chapter describing the layout and workings of the Central Registry, the tale unfolds like a mystery story. I stayed up all one night reading it. I might enjoy it even more if I followed Saramago’s advice and embarked on a “second, more attentive reading”. I did find myself enjoying it more typing out the quotes. Maybe this is a book best read out loud, best read slowly. It’s a book to savor, but I don’t think I’ll sip it twice.

Block Quotes

This might just be coincidence, there are, after all, so many coincidences in life, for one cannot see any close or immediate relationship between that fact and a sudden need for secrecy, but it is well known that the human mind very often makes decisions for reasons it clearly does not know, presumably because it does so after having travelled the paths of the mind at such speed that, afterwards it cannot recognize those paths, let alone find them again.
p 12

Fame, alas, is a breeze that both comes and goes, it is a weather vane that turns both to the north and to the south, and just as person might pass from anonymity to celebrity without ever understanding why, it is equally common for that person, after preening himself in the warm public glow, to end up not even knowing his own name.
p 18

Generally speaking, we don’t talk about a decision appearing to us, people jealously guard both their identity, however vague it might be, and their authority, what little they may have, and prefer to give the impression that they reflected deeply before taking the final step, that they pondered the pros and cons, that they weighed up the possibilites and alternatives, and that, after intense mental effort, they finally made a decision.
p 28

Having acquitted himself well in the administrative inquiry into the disappeared forms, Senhor Jose, in order not to lose the dialectical ground he had won, invented in his mind the fantasy of this new dialogue, from which, despite the ironic, threatening tone of his opponent, he emerged the easy winner, as a second, more attentive reading will prove.
p 31

…there are three people in a marriage, there’s the woman, there’s the man, and there’s what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together…
p 48

…inside my head, and probably inside everyone’s head, there must be a kind of autonomous thought that thinks for itself, that decides things without the participation of any other thought…
p 52

Some questions, however, are very determined, they don’t give up, and this one returned to the attack when, weary in body, exhausted in spirit, Senhor Jose finally went home.
p 64

…there are plenty of people who wouldn’t lift a finger to prevent a violent act being carried out, on the contrary, they would let the curtain fall and return to bed, saying, That’s their business, but there are other people who would save the world, if only the world would let them…
pp 69-70

Thus invoked, God decided to help Senhor Jose out of his difficulty, which is not so very extraordinary when one considers the enormous number of burglars who, ever since the world began, have been fortunate enough to return from their burglaries, not only laden with goods, but also unharmed, that is having suffered no divine punishment.
p 71

Take care of yourself, that was what he said in a tone that was at once deferential and imperative, only the best bosses can combine contrary feelings in such a harmonious way, which is why their subordinates venerate them.
pp 107-108

…if his mind had not been attentive to the multiple meaning of the words he carefully pronounced, especially those that appeared to have only one meaning, those are the ones you have to be most careful with. Contrary to what is generally believed, meaning and sense were never the same thing, meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself, univocal, if you like, while sense cannot stay still, it seethes with second, third, and fourth senses, radiating out in different directions that divide an subdivide into branches and branchlets, until they disappear from view, the sense of every word is like a star hurtling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic pertubations, afflictions.
p 112

On Vlogging

…how are we, being ignorant, to know how far the advances of science might go, just as radio waves, which no one can see, carry sounds and images through the air and the wind, leaping over mountains and rivers, crossing oceans and deserts, it would not be so very extraordinary if scanner waves and photographic waves had not already been discovered or invented, or were to be discovered tomorrow, waves capable of penetrating walls and recording and transmitting to the outside world the deeds, mysteries and humiliations of our life that we had thought safe from indiscretions.
p 157

…the conversation…which he had set down in his notebook, faithful as to the meaning, less so as regards form, which is both understandable and forgivable, since memory, which is very sensitive and hates to be found lacking, tends to fill in any gaps with its own spurious creations of reality, but more or less in line with the facts of which it has only vague recollections, like what remains after the passing of a shadow.
p 170