José Saramago is once again brilliant in his description of a
human being: a common, hard working man,aware and diligent of his duties and obligations, oppressed by his hierarchic superiors, stripped of his big aspiration and dreams, extremely lonely, poor of material goods and even poorer of affection, and nevertheless has an irreprehensible dignity. This is how Sr. José is presented to us. Simple even in his name, as e only has one name, Sr. José seems to usmuch toohuman, of a pure soul, almost naive, self-absorbed, that sets himself by his own free will, aside from himself. General Civil Registry Office: A
public building planned to impress the citizens that need to go there to register births, weddings, divorces and deaths. A building that during it's construction, the engineers didn't worry about the practability the work that would carry out there. An old monumental, totalitarian,labyrinthic, scary and dark building that facilitate the webbing of the spiders, and the dust covering everything invading the lives of the
living and non-living, full of very tall bookshelves filled with
files and processes all the way to the ceiling, cataloguing the live and the dead. A single public building, old-fashioned, overcome like all the files that are fixed and reduce human lives, them being Schools, Libraries or Cemeteries. Sr. José's duty was auxiliary bookkeeper. There are eight bookkeepers, being Sr. José the most fearful of committing any mistake or be adverted. He attends the public dutiful of his task and his functions suffocated by the routine work, fear of his bosses, the are many: four officials, two Sub-Chiefs, one Conservator, and the Supreme Chief. The rules and regulations of the General Civil Registry Office are archaic, denying the employees any relationship or comment not regarded to work. Sr. José being a model accomplisher of his duties, starts an innocent hobby of collecting clippings about famous people, but he starts to discover that the information is not precise and so he recurs to the subtracted, hidden files of the department where he works. During his nocturnal diligences to up-to-date his collection he commits various infractions that he never dared suspecting that he would be capable of. The unknown woman, the most important one of his collection, encouraged him to fearlesslyface the Conservator until turning him into an accomplice of this inhabitable adventure. Like a God, Sr. José ends up mixing dominions of life and death. Iadvise you to read this romance written by José Saramago, the psychological creation of a character that makes us impersonate the edification of the building that is the Registry has reached it's maximumin simplicity, subtleness and fine humour, characteristics that are always present in this author's work. There is a possibility of surprising ourselves by feeling mirrored in the life of Sr. José. A character, a human, too much of a human.