I had a beatific smile on my face when I started reading it. It must have been the effect of Saramago’s beautiful writing style all the way.

If you think your job is boring, read this novel which takes you into the life of a clerk at the Central Registry. Senhor Jose, a lonely civil servant, dutiful during the day and bored at night, challenges his own boredom with the task of finding out what he can about an unknown woman, whose card got attached to the cards of famous people he collected clippings on to fill his evenings. He goes through a great deal of pain in the process, exhausts himself mentally and physically, to just realize how equally unimportant are the lives and deaths.

Saramago serves the readers some of his philosophical takes on life, as his characters see it: “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 able to decide if we will go out to lunch or buy a newspaper or look for the unknown woman.” Or here: “a cemetery like this is a kind of library which contains not books but buried people, it really doesn’t matter, you can learn as much from people as from books.”