mugepekcetin

All the Names by Jose Saramago This is a difficult book to like, let alone understand. It’s told from the viewpoint of Senhor Jose (no family name given), who labors as a lowly clerk recording births and deaths in a monstrously named bureaucracy called The Central Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in an unnamed city in an unnamed country. It’s a place where the essentials of every soul are noted on index cards that are then filed away, sometimes never to be found when searching for them. It’s a dark, gloomy,Kafka-esque tale, replete with literary ironies. E.g., though the title of the book is “All the Names,” the only name given in the entire book is that of Senhor Jose. This man, who has no wife, girlfriend, child or even friend, lives in a house that is physically attached to the Central Registry, and embarks on a quest to find out about one of the names in the Registry, that of a young woman whose card comes into his hand quite by accident. By the end of the book, even sometimes obtuse readers (like me) will realize that Senhor Jose is everyman on a futile quest to understand the mystery of life and death. And the head of the Central Registery, simply called The Registrar, austere, omnipotent and unknowable, is, if not God, someone who enjoys playing God. There is (some) dark suspense in the book but not enough to overcome the difficulties of Saramago’s style, which is to pile on descriptive nouns and adjectives ad infinitum, and what’s more, to write in paragraphs that frequently go on for two or three pages before a new paragraph begins. In the end, all of this becomes disorienting and wearying, dulling the reader’s ability to appreciate the profundity that doubtless lies within these pages. Saramago, a Portugese writer, won the Nobel Prize for Literature but on the basis of this book, at least, I can’t count myself among his fans. Efrem Sigel, 4/1/09, www.efremsigel.com

2022-11-14 17:25