A Book review by Tim McHargue

Friday, July 26, 2013, Seville, Spain by Tim McHargue

ALL THE NAMES

 

            Just finished a challenging book by the most famous contemporary Portuguese novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago, (1922-2010). The book is called “All the Names,” and it is a Kafkaesque book with its description of the depersonalization of the bureaucracy, including,ironically, the absence of names for most characters in the books.

            It is challenging because it is written largely without paragraphs and no quotation marks or indentation to indicate dialogue. Conversation is contained within standard prose sentences and suggested by commas and a capital letter. The paragraphs are often pages long.

            It is also a challenging read because it is about a lowly civil servant, a clerk, who works for the Central Registry for Births, Marriages and Deaths, a government agency that files records of the living and the dead. The Central Registry, therefore, contains “all the names,” and dates and vital statistics. It is a horribly repressive place to work, governed by absurdist and archaic traditions and ruled by fear and intimidation.

            The clerk runs across a card with a name that was somehow misfiled and he begins an obsession to find out who the woman is and the particular facts of her existence. It is a strange compulsion that possesses the clerk, and leads him on a number of risky adventures and, as he is a loner, uncharacteristic encounters with others. He, in a sense, becomes another person as his life and views becomes disoriented by his quest, expanding a rather drab and routine existence as he pursues a passionate search for truth.

            In the midst of his investigative work he finds out that the woman committed suicide. Here the ante of interest rises to the level of intrigue, and curiosity piques as he seeks to unravel the details of this event. At this point he becomes a psychologist, searching for a reason, an explanation, a cause for this shocking occurrence, and he commences a series of interviews with those who knew the women. None have an answer to his question of why she ended her life, I might add.

            I found the clerk’s transition from a collector of names, a repository of facts and figures, to one with an avid interest in one specific individual’s story fascinating and right in line with my study of narrative psychology. The writing, as one would expect of a Nobel Prize winner, is artistry on the page, and the use of language, even though translated from the Portuguese, is vividly descriptive. The underlying themes, and social relevancy for the Information Age, is fairly brilliant and what, ultimately, won Jose Saramago the Nobel award in 1998.

 

“All the Names,” by Jose Saramago, excerpt:

 “He continued to open and close doors, he looked inside rooms to which the diffuse light from outside gave a ghostly air, where the students’ desks looked like lines of tombs, where the teacher’s desk was like a somber sacrificial altar, and the blackboard the place where everyone would be called to account. He saw, pinned to the walls, like the vague stain that time leaves behind on the skins of people and things, maps of the sky, of the world and of different countries, hydrographic and orographic maps of the human body, the digestive tract, the ordering of the muscles, the communication network of the nervous system, the framework of the bones, the bellows of the lungs, the labyrinth of the brain, the section of the eye, the tangle of the genitals.  The classrooms followed one after the other, along corridors that circled the school, everywhere there was the smell of chalk, almost as old as that of bodies, there are even those who believe that God, after shaping the clay from which he later made them, begin by drawing a man and a woman with a stick of chalk on the surface of the first night, which is where we get the one certainty we have, that we were, are and will be dust and that we will be lost in another night as dark as that first night.”