In an unnamed city conjured up by novelist José Saramago, all the names of the inhabitants, living and dead, are cataloged in the massive central registry of births, marriages, and deaths. Each birth means the creation of a new document, and each death means shifting the document from one vast section to an even vaster one. A hapless researcher who ventures into this archival morass does not find his way out again for days. Periodically, the ancient municipal building which houses the records must be expanded to accommodate all the names.
All the Names was originally published as Todos los Nombres in 1997, and, after its author received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, an English edition became more commercially viable. The seventh book by the Portuguese novelist to appear in English, it tells the story of an undistinguished functionary, a fifty-year-old bachelor whose name is given merely as Senhor José. One of the ironies in Saramago’s title is that, with the exception of a protagonist who is provided an unremarkable first name (which he shares with the author) but no surname, all the names of the characters are withheld from the reader. For all the meticulousness of the novel’s prose assertions, the physical appearance of its characters, too, remains vague.
Senhor José toils as a clerk at the central registry, where a rigid hierarchy of eight clerks, four senior clerks, two deputy registrars, and one registrar determines tasks and esteem. A conscientious, friendless drone who lives entirely for his work, who lives alone, and who has not missed a minute on the job in twenty-five years, Senhor José is consumed by anxiety over discharging his duties. He labors in constant dread of judgment by those above him, who all reserve the largest share of chores for those beneath them. The registrar himself remains magisterially aloof from the daily toil of filing and finding records. Yet, though it jeopardizes his position, Senhor José pursues a secret hobby of compiling dossiers on the one hundred most famous people in the country. He makes clandestine copies of the central registry’s files of famous names and amasses as much additional information as he can about them. One Wednesday evening, when the index card for an unknown thirty-six-year-old woman happens to cling to the records of five celebrities, Senhor José suddenly decides to learn as much as he can about her, for reasons he can never quite decipher. All the Names recounts one drab man’s quixotic quest to discover the truth about another obscure life.
“Metaphors have always been the best way of explaining things,” contends a character consulted during Senhor José’s investigation. All the Names is an extended metaphor, which is to say an allegory, about the impossibility of knowing another and knowing oneself. Though it is a depository for what are generally called “vital records,” the central registry is a monument to the moribund, the wrong place to go to understand the qualities of a particular life. Saramago broadens the reach of his allegory by not specifying much about the novel’s setting or its characters. Though they might be the best way of explaining things, the cunning author’s metaphors are as perplexing as the labyrinthine central registry—or as the massive general cemetery, which is also designed to account for everyone. “All the Names,” readers are told, is the unwritten motto of the general cemetery, though it is even more appropriate for the central registry, an enormous archival catacomb where not just the dead but also all the living are recorded and cataloged. Both institutions are, in any case, “digging at either end of the same vine, the vine called life and which is situated between two voids.”
Even more than in his previous book, Ensaio sobre a segueira (1995; Blindness, 1998), in which a city is beset by a mysterious epidemic that deprives residents of their sight, Saramago teases the reader with intimations of enlightenment. As in História do cerco de Lisboa (1989; The History of the Siege of Lisbon, 1996), in which the scribble of an obscure scribe revises history and the Iberian Peninsula floats away from the rest of Europe, the reader is reminded of how factitious is what passes for knowledge. Readers and Senhor José end up knowing precious little about the object of his inquest. To the final page of All the Names, she remains nameless, dubbed only “the unknown woman.” Hers is a name that resists appropriation by the city’s official repository of all names. Even the few facts that are uncovered about her—that she taught mathematics, that she was divorced, that she killed herself by swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills—do not significantly alter the fundamental truth that she, like every other human being, remains unknowable and solitary. In the mock-epic action of this bleak but comic novel, Senhor José, who lives beside and for the central registry, forges a document authorizing him to function as a municipal investigator and sallies off to what is listed as the unknown woman’s residence. During the course of an interrogation that, though awkward, teases with the possibility of genuine communication, her godmother, an old woman who still inhabits a ground-floor apartment in the same building, confides that she had carried on an adulterous affair with the unknown woman’s father. Yet though the investigator and his informant begin to warm toward each other, the trail remains cold. Readers learn that the old woman has not seen her goddaughter in almost thirty years, and that the unknown woman has not lived at that address since she was eight years old. In a quest for further information, Senhor José, summoning up reserves of courage and ingenuity untapped by his work as a clerk, breaks into the school that she attended and spends the night hiding among its records. He also spends another night deep within the general cemetery, beside what may or may not be the unknown woman’s grave. A cryptic shepherd tending his flock amid the huge necropolis confesses that he often rearranges burial markers, a reminder of how arbitrary and approximate are all efforts to systematize human affairs. Though her grieving, puzzled mother provides Senhor José access to the unknown woman’s last apartment, she remains a lonely, irreducible enigma.
Exhausted, famished, bruised, and frightened during the night he spends alone, illegally, within a locked school building trying to find a file on a total stranger, Senhor José reflects on “what torments people have to go through when they leave the safety of their homes to embark on mad adventures.” All the Names is the record of a series of mad adventures that befall an awkward clerk afflicted by the manic impulse to catalog another person’s life. Despite his fear of heights, he clambers over schoolhouse walls, and, despite his zeal to be a perfect clerk, his covert, private mission causes him to be late for, lax on, and even absent from his job. His efforts also make him ill. “Senhor José is being ridiculous, but it doesn’t matter,” the reader is told, “only he knows just how absurd and ridiculous what he is doing is.”
In fact, the reader never doubts the absurdity of the enterprise or the ludicrous ineptitude of the hero, who is both exasperating and endearing. Much of the narrative consists of an “interior dialogue” in which Senhor José, who is not adept at sustaining conversations with others, argues with himself and with a voice he imagines emanating from the ceiling above his bed about extremely petty matters. Should he check the telephone directory? Why did he not wear a necktie the night he determined to visit the unknown woman’s house? Though a locked door separates Senhor José’s residence from his place of employment, he makes use of a neglected key to conduct nocturnal forays into the central registry. Armed with a flashlight and an Ariadne thread to keep from getting lost, he burrows furtively, deep into the archives, to slake his private thirst for information. Despite all Senhor José’s precautions to avoid detection, the registrar, a stern, reproachful figure, appears, aware of his clerk’s surreptitious derelictions and violations. Like the mysterious deity of the Old Testament, he seems vaguely complaisant toward the failings of his inferiors.
The novel’s meticulous attention to details underscores their preposterous insignificance. The sober style employed throughout All the Names to explain the categorizing schemes of the central registry and the general cemetery and to recount diffident Senhor José’s bold venture serves to emphasize how bizarre the whole thing is. A simple telephone call might have spared Senhor José considerable trouble and provided him more timely access to the object of his quest. Ultimately, for all the names that it amasses, the central registry does not get them all, and those that it does record lie littered in a hopeless clutter. A shepherd’s tagging mischief makes a mockery of all the names that seem to identify human beings with their final resting places in the general cemetery. None of his strenuous sleuthing brings Senhor José one whit closer to genuine understanding of the unknown woman. “It doesn’t matter,” he acknowledges in a tonic, comic rejoinder to clerical anxieties about cataloging the cosmos, “the world doesn’t make sense anyway.”
Readers intent on placing Saramago’s work within the categories of world fiction might think of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951; Eng. trans., 1955), whose intricate scheme to distribute sucking stones among his pockets concludes with the realization that one stone is as useless as any other. Jorge Luis Borges’s dizzying fictional puzzles about encyclopedic projects also come to mind, as well as Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the stubborn scrivener who defies the deadly routines of bureaucracy, and Franz Kafka’s droll tales of cosmic dread. Mostly, however, readers will think more and more about Saramago’s distinctive ability to reduce the absurd to a series of inane actions and indelible sentences. “One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger,” contends the shepherd. Saramago’s great achievement is to get the reader to weep for an unknown woman, a clownish clerk, and another stranger—oneself.