Allegory rears its head (as it so often does in this writer’s books) when a chance fascination with an unknown woman whose card he discovers sends him on an odyssey of discovery: a journey that lures the timid civil servant dangerously far out of his shell, involves him in forgery, burglary, and other misdeeds, while simultaneously risking his health (if not his life), and courts the displeasure of the all-knowing, omnipotent Registrar-who, in the dazzling finale, will determine Senhor José’s fate. Senhor José lives in a small house literally connected to the Registry’s main building, and meekly devotes himself to his occupation-while also surreptitiously working on his private collection, which documents the lives of miscellaneous celebrities. The unprepossessing Senhor José, a middle-aged bachelor, works as a clerk in a nameless large city’s Central Registry (of Births, Marriages, and Deaths)-an Orwellian maze whose largest section is eternally extended backward, to accommodate the records of the ever-increasing ranks of the deceased. (Oct.The resonant themes of identity and autonomy are examined with keen precision and rich humor in the Portuguese Nobel laureate’s most recent (1997) fiction, a novel that compares very interestingly with Saramago’s fascinating The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1997).
This semi-allegory is certainly not one of Saramago's more noteworthy offerings. Afonso has several hokey "dialogues" with "common sense" his situation, which might be the germ for an excellent short story, is stretched out far beyond the length it deserves. Narrating in his usual long, rambling sentences, Saramago suspends his characters and their actions in fussy authorial asides. Soon the two are in a competition that involves sex and power. The actor, a rather sleazy fellow, resents Afonso's presence, as if his identical appearance were a sort of ontological theft. Finally tracking the man down, he suggests a meeting. Soon Afonso is feverishly renting videos, trying to find the actor's name, while hiding his project from his suspicious colleague, his lover and his mother. The video itself is a forgettable comedy, but the actor who plays the minor role of hotel clerk (so minor he isn't listed in the credits) is Afonso's physical double. On the suggestion of a colleague, one night Máximo watches a video that changes everything. Middle-aged, divorced and in a relationship with a woman, Maria da Paz, he is bored with life. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a history teacher in an unnamed metropolis (presumably Lisbon). The double motif, which has fascinated authors as diverse as Poe, Dostoyevski and Nabokov, is revived in this surprisingly listless novel by Portuguese master Saramago.
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