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What is in a name? What is it in those few letters that hides our identity, hides our story, hides our whole life? How can so few pieces of information contain a world; a grain of sand containing a world? How can we at once be our name but then also not be it?

These are not necessarily the questions that José Saramago ask in his beautifully written novel, All the Names, but they are some of the issues that he deals with.

Before I continue with this book review, I have to warn you that this post does contain SPOILERS, so if you want to read the book for yourself, please do not continue.

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(LAST WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS)

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With that out of the way...

The book begins like no other book. Nobel prize winners write like no other authors. They are unique, and they are strange. (Not to digress, but if you read the work of authors like Orhan Pamuk, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, amongst others, you will know what I mean. They read different.)

The book starts with a beautifully mundane and everyday occurrence. The way Saramago describes the scene was why I bought the book. (I have read his most famous work, The Blindness, in 2014, which is quite a time ago! But this book was also rich with descriptions in such poetic beauty.)

We are then introduced to our main character with whom we never depart. The books unfolds as Senhor José, who is the only real name we are given throughout the novel, stumbles upon an insignificant name written upon a registry card. Senhor José, who works a mundane job, entertains himself by collecting newspaper clippings on famous people. But when he saw the name of this woman, who is by no means close to being famous, something tickles Senhor José's fancy. He gets obsessed with finding mundane detail about her: where did she go to school? Where does she live? Is she married? Who are her friends?

This is not a book on obsession. This is not a book about a stalker. This is a book about the profound lives we live that is linked to our names, yet no one really pays attention to it. And this is where the obsession resides: in the letting one's life be opened up so that we do not end with just a birth certificate and a death certificate. What comes in between those two documents is what this novel is about.

All the Names is not an easy read. For one, the unique writing style of Saramago makes it difficult to remain focused on who is speaking at what time. He does not use quotation marks, and he does not say who is talking or thinking at which moment. It feels like one long lucid dream. The text is also provided in one long block format, there is barely any open blank space on the pages. It feels like a commitment you need to make to read this book.

The book is also not easy due to its topic that covers something so everyday: our own lives can be substituted into the one of the woman he is searching for. She was a nobody like most of us. Nobody in the sense of being compared to those who live lives in the media, in the public eye. This does not mean that our lives are not worthless. In fact, as portrayed in this book, our lives need to be lived, and it is important. All the names in the registry where our lead character works is characterised by two things: they are born and receive a birth certificate, and they die, they receive a death certificate. But there is so much that happens in between these two events.

Saramago takes us through strange adventures that Senhor José embarks on to find biographical detail about the woman he is searching for. From meeting next door neighbours who cannot really help him, but who becomes strange friends, to finding a random sheep herder in a graveyard who plays the most existentially absurd game, we are taken with this man who cannot let go of this one name, amongst all the names.

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If you decide to read this book, you will enjoy the process. It is a commitment that you make to go along the journey with both Senhor José and Saramago. When you end up in the cemetery where the story in some sense concludes, you will read one of the most beautifully written and strangest encounters. The play on ideas, the existential ideas, and the writing of Saramago is beautiful, and I could not help but read it twice. At some stage, he writes the following:

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It was true that, after long and arduous labours, he had managed, at last, to find the unknown woman, or rather, the place where she lay, a good six feet beneath an earth that still sustained him, but, he thought to himself, the normal response would be to feel afraid, fearful of the place, the hour, the rustling trees, the mysterious moonlight, and, in particular, of the strange cemetery surrounding him, an assembly of suicides, a gathering of silences that, from one moment to the next, might begin to scream … (page 202, in my copy.)

As can be seen, the author writes so beautifully, and the phrasing of "a gathering of silences that [...] might begin to scream" is just beyond me and captures so much of one's own feelings.

Postscriptum, or Please Read More

The world would be a better place if we all read more. This can be contested, but literature provides us with so much beauty and insights into the worlds of others that we cannot but be better.

This is wholly utopian.

Either way, I really hope that you will read this book, even if only to wet your feet into the nobel prize winner literature.

For now, happy reading, and keep well.

All of the musings and writings are my own. Unless I hyperlinked it. The opinions are also my own. The photographs are my own, taken with my Nikon D300.