Senhor Jose is employed as a low-level clerk in the bureaucratic Central Registry. By chance, he undertakes a quest: to track down information about a woman whose name he learns by accident.

His world is small (he is "convinced that the rest of the world follows the same deductive path as he does"), and he ventures further and further afield in search of information about the mystery woman. Senhor Jose has difficulties with personal relationships, and is not particularly intent on actually meeting the woman of his quest. He'd rather know about her than know her.

(Spoiler warning: Skip this paragraph if you don't want to learn a key plot point. Senhor Jose's inquiries may have precipitated the woman's suicide, yet he never confronts this possibility.)

To Senhor Jose, a life's value is proven if it is documented. He says, "Anyway, the fact stands recorded," as if recordation is evidence enough of meaning. And yet, at the end, Senhor Jose finds that human beings end up nameless (and numberless), with documentation being meaningless.

My regard for Senhor Jose went from sympathy to amusement to something like dismay. The story turned into a religious allegory (come on, hit us over the head with it…a shepherd, and sheep?).

Saramago's writing style is notable in that he uses run-on paragraphs and comma splices, rather than quotation marks, to identify conversation. While not quite stream of consciousness, we do get a flow of ideas. I didn't find this style difficult to follow, but it did require careful reading.