Chanced upon this book by Jose Saramago, while browsing in a book store at Connaught Place now renamed as Rajiv Chowk.

Part fact, part fiction, part real, part fantasy, part monologue, part dialogue, part philosophy, part blabber, part investigative, part an inquiry into the Kafkaesque world we all have come to inhabit, All the Names is an amazing account of the work and life of an archivist in the registry of death, birth and marriages.

Senor Jose, is a clerk in the Registry. He is fifty years old divorcee. He lives in a room attached with the registry. His working life for past thirty years was to collect, collate and classify the name, age and address of citizens as they were born, got married and died.

Absolute order prevailed in the registry. Talking with peers, subordinates and juniors was discouraged. The registry, needless to say, comprised of rows upon rows of cabinets filled with forms on citizens.

Senor Jose becomes an insomniac and gets bored with his life. Looking for some change, he starts pursuing a hobby. To collect the names of a hundred famous men, and build a private archive. Every night after dark he would sneak in to the registry through a side door of his house and collect details of private lives of these men.

One day as he was about to collect the last five index cards, he chances upon a card bearing the name of an unknown woman, who, as the card tells him, was a thirty five years old divorcee. He becomes intrigued by the card and by the fact that he is holding that card. Questioning the identity of that name he gets interested in the life story of that woman and starts a journey to find more about the person behind the name.

Saramago fills his palette with dark colors and gray shades and paints a vivid canvas that has a noir like quality to it. He makes the central character of senor Jose constantly question himself, about his conduct, thought and actions. Interrogating through the grid governance, of which the registry is an important joint, the book seeks to inquire deeply into the nature of thought through which the society constructs discourses around abstractions like citizenship, administration and identity.

Most importantly, All the Names, is an invocation of an archivist world and his dilemmas romance and boredoms about his work. It’s an attempt to create an archive of stories that lay hidden behind alphanumeric digits, folded in coded files, atop dusty cupboards in nameless, faceless, formless archives all around the world.