All The Names by José Saramago7/2/2023 Senhor José lives in a small house literally connected to the Registry’s main building, and meekly devotes himself to his occupation-while also surreptitiously working on his private collection, which documents the lives of miscellaneous celebrities. The unprepossessing Senhor José, a middle-aged bachelor, works as a clerk in a nameless large city’s Central Registry (of Births, Marriages, and Deaths)-an Orwellian maze whose largest section is eternally extended backward, to accommodate the records of the ever-increasing ranks of the deceased. The resonant themes of identity and autonomy are examined with keen precision and rich humor in the Portuguese Nobel laureate’s most recent (1997) fiction, a novel that compares very interestingly with Saramago’s fascinating The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1997).
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