1997

All the Names

Name: All the Names
Author: José Saramago

José Saramago · 1922–2010 · Portugal

Originally Todos os Nomes (Portuguese) · translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Why it matters

A lonely clerk at a vast Central Registry of the living and the dead secretly pursues the file of a woman he has never met. Saramago's most intimate late novel turns bureaucracy itself into a meditation on mortality and obsession.

At a glance

psychological novelphilosophical novel

Difficulty 6/10slow pace256 pages

Quieter and shorter than his major novels, but still built from the same unbroken, unpunctuated sentences.

More by José Saramago →

Deep dive

What a lonely clerk in a vast civil registry does with the one index card he pockets for himself, and how far a bureaucracy will let you go before it notices you have started writing your own file.

Written for readers who have finished the book. No plot recap, and nothing here is safe to read first.

Themes & symbolism

Senhor José works as the lowest-ranked clerk at the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, a building so enormous that its shelving corridors run back for what registry legend claims are kilometers, with a single crumbling interior wall separating the files of the living from the vastly larger files of the dead. Saramago builds the whole novel out of that architecture: bureaucracy here is not an obstacle to mortality but a second, parallel necropolis, and José's illicit after-hours visits to the archive, tying a length of string to the door so he can find his way back out, turn paperwork retrieval into something closer to a descent.

José's one private hobby before the novel starts is collecting newspaper clippings about famous people, a harmless substitute intimacy with lives he will never touch; when he pulls, apparently by accident, the card of an anonymous, unremarkable woman instead, the obsession that follows is really the same habit turned toward someone his own size, and it is precisely her ordinariness, no fame, no scandal, that makes his search feel less like curiosity and more like a species of love he has no other outlet for.

The string José ties to himself in the dark archive recalls a story he half remembers about a shepherd who used a similar trick, marking a trail so as never to lose his way among his own flock, and Saramago lets that folk image stand in for what writing itself does: a thread laid down after the fact, which is also the exact method of this novel's own long, winding, almost punctuation-free sentences, following one clause into the next by touch rather than by plan.

The Registrar Who Had Been Watching the Whole Time

José's nighttime searches are, in theory, a serious breach, and the novel's late confrontation with the Registrar, his superior, threatens for a moment to end in dismissal or worse. Instead the Registrar reveals he has known for some time and, rather than reporting José, effectively deputizes his obsession, hinting that the strict boundary between the archive of the dead and the records of the living exists to be quietly crossed by exactly the kind of devotion José has been practicing. The scene turns the novel's antagonist into something closer to a fellow keeper of the same secret, complicit rather than punitive.

The last seal: what actually happens, and why it lands the way it does.