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decades. Senhor José's residence, where he lives alone, adjoins the municipal building and contains the only side entrance into it. Lost in the tedium of a bureaucratic job, he starts to collect information about various famous people and decides, one evening, to use the side entrance to sneak in and steal their record cards.
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On one nocturnal venture Senhor José grabs the record card of an "unknown woman" by mistake and quickly becomes obsessed with finding her. Senhor José uses his power as a registry clerk to gather information about the "unknown woman" from her past neighbors and, when it is suggested to look her up in
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Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us. The proof can be found in the fact that, though life leads us to carry out the most diverse actions one after the other, we do not prelude each one with a period of reflection, evaluation and calculation, and only then declare ourselves
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The protagonist is named Senhor José; the only character in the novel to be given a proper name (all of the others are referred to simply by some unique and defining characteristic). Senhor José is around fifty years old and has worked as a low-level clerk in the
Central Registry for more than two
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The search for this woman begins to consume him and affects his work enough so to draw attention from the
Registrar — head of the Central Registry— who, strangely, begins to regard Senhor José with sympathy. This special attention given to a clerk by the Registrar is unprecedented in the known
212:, highlighted through Senhor José's journey in piecing together the life of the unknown woman and the effects she had on the people and things, as well as the registry's conclusion that the living and dead's files should be put together as one, is that in order to be properly looked at, the
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The main setting of the novel is the
Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths located in an ambiguous and unnamed city. This municipal archive holds the record cards for all of the residents of the city stretching back endlessly into the past.
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history of the
Central Registry and begins to worry his fellow employees. Senhor José further neglects his duties as a civil servant and risks his career to pursue this "unknown woman" he knows almost nothing about.
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must include the lives of the living and the dead, the remembered and the forgotten, and the known and unknown. Indeed, this is a recurring theme in
Saramago's works.
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able to decide if we will go out to lunch or buy a newspaper or look for the unknown woman."
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a phone book, he ignores the advice, choosing instead to keep his distance.
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Another theme is the absurdity of human action. As
Saramago puts it:
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175:'s 1999 English translation of it won the
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548:Poética dos Cinco Sentidos - O Ouvido
513:Don Giovanni ou O Dissoluto Absolvido
372:The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
171:. The novel was written in 1997, and
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497:A Segunda Vida de Francisco de Assis
393:The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
177:Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
386:The History of the Siege of Lisbon
358:Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
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289:(1st Eng. ed.). Harcourt.
253:(1st Eng. ed.). Harcourt.
634:20th-century Portuguese novels
556:The Tale of the Unknown Island
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167:, the recipient of the 1998
16:1997 novel by José Saramago
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208:One of the main themes in
31:First edition (Portuguese)
169:Nobel Prize in Literature
106:Published in English
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574:This World and the Other
489:Que Farei Com Este Livro
435:Death with Interruptions
624:Novels by José Saramago
581:The Traveller's Baggage
449:The Elephant's Journey
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365:Baltasar and Blimunda
588:Opinions That DL Had
442:Memories of My Youth
281:(2 September 1999).
245:(2 September 1999).
602:Journey to Portugal
173:Margaret Jull Costa
61:Margaret Jull Costa
47:Original title
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336:José Saramago
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183:Plot summary
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629:1997 novels
566:Non-fiction
351:Land of Sin
618:Categories
421:The Double
229:References
161:Portuguese
149:Portuguese
71:Portuguese
57:Translator
595:The Notes
532:O Embargo
400:Blindness
334:Works by
77:Publisher
558:" (1997)
463:Skylight
414:The Cave
135:41504630
99:Portugal
67:Language
481:A Noite
272:Sources
163:author
159:by the
155:) is a
80:Caminho
551:(1979)
543:(1978)
535:(1973)
516:(2005)
508:(1993)
500:(1987)
492:(1980)
484:(1979)
428:Seeing
343:Novels
293:
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204:Themes
37:Author
473:Plays
157:novel
456:Cain
291:ISBN
255:ISBN
129:OCLC
116:ISBN
110:1999
90:1997
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327:e
320:t
313:v
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147:(
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Additional terms may apply.
