All the Names

4.5

I find José Saramago to be one of the greatest writers I've come across. His writing style complements his sense of humour and humanity, and the way he weaves his stories out of the sometimes comical, sometimes absurd, often both, and of the everyday comings and goings of people, results in his hands in strong prose, acute sense of humanity and overall entertaining literature.

That said, All the Names (1997) was, for some reason, a bit of a letdown. I did appreciate the play with catalogues, identity and search of self, and I think the parts of the book that had our narrator play detective against the regulations straight out of Gilliam's Brazil (1985) were fantastic literature. But something I couldn't connect with, and found myself losing the way at some point, and couldn't find back.

The overall feeling that remains after perhaps four months is that it could have been shorter, which is strange since I've never felt Saramago to meander or beat around the bush. It won't be until sometime when I'll give it another try, but maybe I simply read it at the wrong time.

6 October,
2014

I believe it is doing as much injustice to put a novel into categories we so like to label and start discussing them in wake of the so called stalwarts of so and so masters of those genres, as it is to express concerns like one's inability to keep up with an author's tiring style of writing , his oblitreration of punctuation in writing.
Sometimes, it is far more important to persevere with the tale and especially when itis a result of pure and honest imagination.
Here is a novel wherein, once again, the novelist so aptly questions our notions of dreams and realities. Once again, Saramago addresses the lone human heart and its ramblings that , I am convinced the author believed, are the true sustenance of human beings.