"All the Names" is a 1997 novel by Portuguese author Jose Saramago, originally in Portuguese as "Todos os Nomos", and released in English in 1999. It was released the year before Jose Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and while prizes are not granted to works, but to people, it may have been a factor in his award.
I have actually had a quest, for quite some time, to read a work by every Nobel Prize winning author, a quest that has been on hold for a while. A few weeks ago, by chance, I looked in a Little Free Library, and found two books by Saramago, and then saw that Saramago was a Nobel Prize winner, and thought it was a fine piece of serendipitous guidance.
The book is set in an undescribed, fictional, and surreal city and country, where a man named Jose is a clerk at a central registry (central registries are real things in countries of Iberian cultures, and despite this book's exaggerations, are indeed very bureaucratic places), where he is a minor cog in a harsh and formal bureaucracy. He lives in a small building adjoining the central registry, without a family or any outside activities. He is a type of Underground Man, living on the fringe of a society without coming into direct conflict with it. His one rebellious activity is to collect records of famous people for his own collection. His life takes a turn when he finds a record of a seemingly typical woman, and for no particular reason, decides to find out more about her. He researches her, and hunts about the city, believing for some reason that discovering more about her is the key to something.
It actually isn't that much of a plot. But Saramago is able to create a very special atmosphere for the story. If I could describe this book's atmosphere in one word, it would be "claustrophobic". Saramago uses very long paragraphs, some running to several pages, and doesn't space out his dialogue or use quotation marks. The only character mentioned by name in the book is the protagonist, and all other characters are referred to by title or description---which is ironic given the name of the book). It leads to the prose feeling heavy and dense, and in the case of this book, perfectly complements the feeling of being in the dusty labyrinth of the central registry. Reading this book, to me, was like looking at a charcoal drawing. In addition to this, the vagueness of the location and time also adds to the effect. The book takes place in a city, and in a time, that is not specified. There are no references to historical events. The level of technology seems to be about that of the 1980s (at one time an answering machine is mentioned, but the registry seems to be decades away from any usage of computers (and, coincidentally, I found this same vague use of technology in another book I read earlier this year)). At least from my perspective in The United States, it would be hard to address some of the issues in this book about individualism and conformity without giving at least a nod to the 1960s, and I find it unusual that Jose Saramago, who grew up as a leftist under Portugal's right-wing regime, managed to not make some sort of commentary on that. But, of course, that is why this is literature, because it is an abstracted story about the human experience. So this book is an ahistorical, vaguely located, and claustrophobic book, told in dense and difficult prose. All of which is part of what we can expect to find when we are reading experimental literature.
I have to admit, that while I did find the book interesting in its own way, and admired Saramago's ability to create a narrative texture, I was still, at the conclusion of the book, unsure about what was being communicated to me. Was this book a topical allusion, a protest against bureaucracy? Was it a comment upon people's ability to create narratives and connections from seemingly unrelated thing? Was it a general statement on the absurdity of the human condition. Honestly, I really don'y know, but my inability to find a meaning should not be seen as a condemnation.