"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 All the Names, 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 is 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 The Stone Raft or an entire country afflicted by a devastating malady in Blindness, he is fascinated by the effects of isolation on the human soul and, correspondingly, the redemptive power of compassion. All the Names 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. --Alix Wilber


From Publishers Weekly
The deceptive simplicity of Nobel Prize-winner Saramago's prose, and the ironic comments that he intersperses within this story of an obsessional quest, initially have a disarming effect; one expects that this low-key exploration of a quiet man's eccentric descent into a metaphysical labyrinth will be an extremely intelligent but unexciting read. Unexciting: wrong. Within the first few pages, Saramago establishes a tension that sings on the page, rises, produces stunning revelations and culminates when the final paragraph twists expectations once again. The title refers to the miles of archival records among which the protagonist toils at the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths in an unnamed small country whose inhabitants still live by ancient rules of hierarchical social classes. The registry is quixotically disorganized so that the files of those most recently deceased are buried under miles of paper at the furthest remove of the massive building. After more than two decades at the job, 50-year-old Senhor Jos is still a mere clerk in the bureau. A penurious, reclusive, lonely bachelor, Senhor Jos has only one secret passion: he collects clippings about famous people and surreptitiously copies their birth certificates, purloining them from the registry at night and returning them stealthily. Purely by accident, the index card of a 36-year-old woman unknown to him becomes entangled in the clippings he steals. Suddenly, he is stricken by a need to learn about this woman's life. Consumed by passion, this heretofore model of punctilious behavior commits a series of dangerous and unprofessional acts. He forges official papers, breaks into a building, removes records from institutions and continues to enter the registry after darkDall punishable offenses. To carry out his mission, he is forced to become practical, clever and brave. But the more risks he takes, the more astonishing events occur, chief among them that the remote, authoritarian Registrar takes a personal interest in his lowly employee. Meanwhile, Senhor Jos himself discovers shocking facts about the woman he seeks. Saramago relates these events in finely honed prose pervaded with irony, but also playful, mocking and witty. Alternately farcical, macabre, surreal and tragic, this mesmerizing narrative depicts the loneliness of individual lives and the universal need for human connection even as it illuminates the fine line between the living and the dead. First serial to Grand Street, the Reading Room and Doubletake; QPB and Reader's Subscription Club selection; author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Senhor Jose is a low-level clerk in the Portuguese Civil Registry of births, deaths, and marriages, where it is next to impossible for him to squeeze out of that rigid hierarchy even one miserable half-hour off work. A middle-aged bachelor with no interest in anything beyond the dates and facts that are his daily fare, he is especially fascinated by the vital statistics of celebrities. One day he becomes particularly preoccupied by the birth certificate of an anonymous young woman who he learns is a mathematics teacher. As he becomes more and more obsessed with her, his resolve to learn all that he can about her leads to tragedy. The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance and sudden flashes of recognition, and the discovery of tentative love are all skillfully woven together in this imaginative parable of the living and the dying. Saramago, the 1988 Nobel literary laureate, has here written a tantalizing anatomy of an obsession.-DJack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The recent Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for literature is known for his cerebral but perfectly enticing novels that are often more about ideas than events. His latest is no exception, a riveting, Kafkaesque journey into one man's obsession amid the arid, repetitive, and cumbersome bureaucratic environment in which he works. Senhor Joseis employed in the Central Registry in what we assume to be the Portuguese capital, Lisbon. This office keeps the vital records of all the country's citizens, including registrations of birth, marriage, and death. Senhor Jose, by an odd set of circumstances, lives in a room attached to the registry and accessed by an old key. One day he comes upon an incomplete record of a woman and is caught up in the idea that she deserves to be known. Surreptitiously, for he could lose his job, Senhor Jose searches the archives available to him and then takes to the streets to track the woman down. This haunting, strangely moving novel is uplifting despite the tragic nature of the woman's life; Saramago's true theme here is how compassion ultimately rules human behavior. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

Our Review
What's in a Name?
As you might imagine, the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths is organized in the following manner: active files (birth and marriage certificates) are kept up front; inactive files are stored away in the back. Files become inactive when the death certificate is attached. Because the number of new active files matches the number that become inactive every year, the active section never grows or shrinks, while the death archives grow infinitely as the years pass. This bastion of administrative bureaucracy is soberly manned by a small regiment of lackeys and lorded over by the wise and untouchable Registrar. One low-level lackey, Senhor José, is the hero of Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago's latest novel, All the Names.

A dependable, unobtrusive employee, Senhor José leads a simple life. He has one good suit, lives alone in a humble apartment that through a quirk of urban development connects in the back to the Registry, and he spends his free time keeping scrapbooks of famous people. Senhor José's safe, quiet life takes a sudden turn when he decides one evening to up the ante on his celebrity scrapbook by including birth, marriage, and death certificates, which entails sneaking into the Registry after hours to borrow the necessary documents. In the dark, he accidentally grabs the wrong certificate and becomes, from that point on, pathologically obsessed with finding the Unknown Woman whose name he stumbles upon. His feckless investigation follows the kind of paper trail he's most familiar with: marriage and divorce licenses, school records, the inevitable death certificate and autopsy report, and, finally, a graveyard map that leads him to a numbered plot in the suicide section of the General Cemetery. There, in the first light of dawn, Senhor José meets a prankster shepherd who switches around the markers on the new graves, delivering the dead back into anonymity and saving them from the indignity of being just a number, certificate, or name. And so, on the last possible stop of Senhor José's search, he loses his Unknown Woman. Yet, through the often hilarious twists and turns of his strange and reckless investigation, he's unearthed the story of her life. Perhaps more importantly, he's created a memory where there was none, and come to care for a woman he never met and never would meet.

From the necropolis of index cards to the quintessential figure of a lonely, fearful, clerk, All the Names has the makings of a Kafkaesque parable about the loss of humanity -- except it's a beautiful, platonic love story, a love story that's made all the more wrenching by how very one-sided it is and by the nagging question, unique to suicides: If she'd known how much she was loved, would she still have wanted to die? Critics have variously described Saramago as a postmodern writer or a political writer, but the most convincing description is of Saramago as a metaphysical writer. His 1998 novel, Blindness, an allegory about the curse of vision in a world succumbed to blindness, certainly has political implications. But the underlying question of Blindness is metaphysical: Do I exist if others can't see me? It's the same kind of question that defines All the Names: Do you exist if you're dead? And, if you're loved, how can you not exist? The dead are not filed away in an endless, dark, labyrinthine archive but are among us in memory and in their stories. A clerk who traffics in human existence according to forms and certificates finds and loses love in a single gesture. He brings a woman back to life in the same way a great novelist brings characters to life in our imaginations. All the Names is a testament to the power of compassion and imagination, to the miraculous feat of storytelling.

Minna Proctor is a writer and translator. She lives in New York.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily preoccupations. In the evenings, and on weekends, he works on bringing up to date his clipping file of the famous, the rising stars, the notorious. But when one day he comes across the birth certificate of an anonymous young woman, he decides that this cannot have been mere chance, he has to discover more about her. After all, to know a name is not to know the person.

Under the increasingly mystified eye of the Registrar, a godlike figure whose name is spoken only in whispers, the now obsessed Senhor José sets off, in every moment he can steal from work, to follow the thread that leads him to the woman's school, to her godmother, to her father and mother-but as he gets closer to a meeting with the unknown woman, he discovers more about her, and about himself, than he would have wished....

The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance and moments of recognition, the discovery of love, however tentative...once again José Saramago has written a timeless story.

About the Author:

José Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922. He is the author of six novels, including Blindness, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The History of the Siege of Lisbon. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

FROM THE CRITICS

Robert Irwin - The New York Times Book Review

...a fine powerful parable.

Times (London)

The Swedish Academy's citation called his novels 'parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony.' It is a description which perfectly captures his latest novel.

Merle Rubin - Christian Science Monitor

Saramago's gentle voice rings with the unmistakable authority of the true artist.

Philip Connors - The Wall Street Journal

...a master far from content to rest on his laurels.

Jean Charbonneau - Denver Post