A Project: All the Names by José Saramago

This month, the Internet Book Club tackles a Nobel Prize-winning author's take on bureaucracy and individuality.

In the novel All the Names by Portuguese author José Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, a bureaucratic clerk referred to just as “Senhor José” breaks out of his stultifying routine.  He works at an office called the Central Registry, which keeps records of his city’s births, deaths, marriages and divorces.  It’s a dreary, dank and dusty workplace with a rigid hierarchy of duties and constricting rules. 

A 50-year-old bachelor, Senhor José lives alone in a dingy flat adjacent to the Central Registry.  Apart from work, he has a hobby of collecting clippings of famous people, then sneaking in and out of the Registry at night to add the information from the celebrities’ official record cards to his collection.  One day an extra card corresponding to an unknown woman flutters out from those he had deliberately borrowed.  It apparently got stuck to a card of one of his targets.