In "Blindess", another masterpiece, Saramago begins with a devastating unexplained event -- nearly everyone in the world goes blind at once. The nameless characters reveal themselves (one might say that mankind reveals itself) in how they cope in the very credible aftermath. You imagine yourself there with them. As one character who can see explains, "The only miracle we can perform is to go on living...to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it realy does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence, and this is what we have made of it..."
In "All the Names", we follow the hopes and fears of Senhor Jose, a clerk in the Central Registry -- a descendant of Dickens' Bob Cratchit, Gogol's Akaky Akakevich, and Melville's Bartleby, working in a vast bureaucracy reminiscent of Kafka, Borges, and Charlie Chaplin.. The mind-numbing petty emptiness of the work which fills his life borders on the metaphysical -- "...giving full attention to the names and dates whose supreme importance lies in the fact that, in the present instance, it is those names and dates that give legal existence to the reality of existence." In this bizarre context, petty concerns become all-consuming.
In "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" we live the life of a minor poet and scholar, who in his twilight years returns to Lisbon from Brazil. Seinfeld made comedy out of nothing. Saramago succeeds in making romance and tragedy out of nothing. In a work like this, nothing is important -- it is very important, indeed. The lives of the characters are built around the nothings that they must deal with day after day, and the nothings that they obsess over. There is nothing but nothing. And in the midst of nothing we must be kind to and understanding of one another; and from nothing we must build the meaning of our lives.
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