All The Names

Early on while reading Jose Saramago's All The Names I was putting together a blog post in my head that fit it into Saramago's works as a sort of precursor to The Double, while finding All The Names okay but not nearly as good. They both explore similar ideas of stalking, with All The Names taking place in an era before the internet made it easy to find out everything about someone in a few seconds. The only character named in the book, Senhor Jose, is a meek middle aged man who works at the registry for a large city, and thus is one of the few people with access to basic information about everyone. As a hobby he collects information on celebrities, but through a clerical mistake he winds up reading about an unknown woman and becomes obsessed with her. Armed with nothing but her date and location of birth he sets out to find everything he can about the woman, feeling she deserves to be known and important to someone, anyone, even if the reasons are tenuous. About halfway through, the book takes an odd turn- the woman turns out to have died recently in a suicide, leading to a second half where we witness Senhor Jose try to help her family grieve, with some of Saramago's ideas about death and remembrance sprinkled in as well. It ended up being a bit different from the other works of his I've read- there's still the lack of punctuation and loads of conversations taking place is someone's head, but the abrupt change of theme was new to me. Actually now that I think of it he pulled something similar in Seeing, but that didn't work nearly as well. I did like that what started as a book that tried to crawl into the mind of a stalker ended up dealing with some very unexpected themes- hopefully the guy's got some more surprises in store in the other half of his translated works.