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Claire MessudClaire Messud's new novel, The Woman Upstairs, is fiercely intelligent and urgently intimate, written with precision, humor, and an incredible... Continue »
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3 Beaverton Literature- A to Z

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All the Names

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All the Names Cover

ISBN13: 9780151004218
ISBN10: 0151004218
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily preoccupations. In the evenings and on weekends, he works on bringing up to date his clipping file of the famous, the rising stars, the notorious. But when he comes across the birth certificate of an anonymous young woman, he decides that this cannot have been mere chance, that he has to discover more about her. Under the increasingly mystified eye of the Registrar, a godlike figure whose name is spoken only in whispers, the now obsessed Senhor José sets off to follow the thread that leads him to the unknown woman-but as he gets closer to a meeting with her, he discovers more about her, and about himself, than he would have wished. The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance and moments of recognition, the discovery of love, however tentative-once again José Saramago has written a timeless story.

Review:

"Saramago has a light, graceful, ironical touch, and he maintains a welcome restraint in his use of the paraphernalia of magical realism, that literary dead-end into which so many talented writers have stumbled over the past two or three decades, chasing like lemmings after the ghosts of the colorful Buendia clan. Saramago is well aware that, contrary to popular notions, one of the novelist's primary duties is to keep his imagination under tight control." John Banville, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review here)
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About the Author

JOSÉ SARAMAGO was born in 1922. He is the author of numerous novels, including Blindness, All the Names, The Cave, and Death with Interruptions. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
djmogo, January 1, 2010 (view all comments by djmogo)
Powell's wants to know the best book I read in the last decade, and it's probably nearly a tie between this and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. But I probably have to go with this one. Saramago concluded his Nobel address talking about this, his then-most-recent book: He wrote that following Blindness, he started All the Names "as if trying to exorcise the monsters generated by the blindness of reason, started writing the simplest of all stories: one person is looking for another, because he has realised that life has nothing more important to demand from a human being. The book is called All the Names. Unwritten, all our names are there. The names of the living and the names of the dead."

I've read a lot of great books, and very few are as distinctive and perfect as this one.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780151004218
Translator:
Costa, Margaret Jull
Author:
Costa, Margaret Jull
Author:
Saramago, Jose
Author:
Saramago
Publisher:
Mariner Books
Location:
New York :
Subject:
General
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Clerks
Subject:
Social isolation
Subject:
Vital statistics
Subject:
Registers of births, etc.
Subject:
Recording and registration.
Subject:
Portuguese fiction
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Copyright:
2000
Edition Number:
1st U.S. ed.
Edition Description:
Trade Cloth
Series Volume:
#WR-98-151
Publication Date:
20011005
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
264
Dimensions:
8 x 5.31 in 0.54 lb
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Related Subjects

Fiction and Poetry » Literature » A to Z

All the Names Used Hardcover
0 stars - 0 reviews
$6.95 In Stock
Product details 264 pages Harcourt - English 9780151004218 Reviews:
"Review" by , "Saramago has a light, graceful, ironical touch, and he maintains a welcome restraint in his use of the paraphernalia of magical realism, that literary dead-end into which so many talented writers have stumbled over the past two or three decades, chasing like lemmings after the ghosts of the colorful Buendia clan. Saramago is well aware that, contrary to popular notions, one of the novelist's primary duties is to keep his imagination under tight control." (read the entire New Republic review here)
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