Cain

Starred review from July 25, 2011
With breathtaking imagination, acclaimed Portuguese author Saramago (1922-2010), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, revels in biblical themes for his final novel. When Cain, the first-born son of Adam and Eve, murders his brother in rebellion against God, God shares in the guilt ("you gods should...take the blame for all the crimes committed in your name," Cain argues) and makes Cain "a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth." Cain's travels across a barren landscape lead him to a lusty tryst with Lilith and the witnessing, or altering, of many key events of the Old Testament (the building of the Tower of Babel; the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah). God appears often and is defined less by his perfection than his faults; He is morally ambiguous, "can't bear to see anyone happy," and doesn't understand his powerlessness in preventing Cain's meddling. Rounding out the narrative are angels who circumvent God's will, visions of the urban modernity that the future holds, an ironic description of Darwinian evolution, and God himself touting the heliocentric theory that will cause something of a ruckus five centuries on. Cain's vagabond journey builds to a stunning climax that, like the book itself, is a fitting capstone to a remarkable career.

November 15, 2011
Why would a dedicated communist and atheist turn to the Bible as the theme for his final novel? Because the Bible is literature, and literature in a way that the best writers have long recognized—and the late Saramago (Small Memories, 2011, etc.) is one of the best. Indeed: The best modern (if not modernist) writers—Mann, Kafka, Bellow, the list goes on—have always made fruitful use of the Bible, and particularly in subversive readings of it that match the collapse of faith in Western civilization's post-Nietzschean twilight. In the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner (and communist and atheist) Saramago's case, the story opens as it does in the Bible: with Genesis, that is, in which God is an impatient, violent and impulsive chap who isn't quite sure why the humans he created have turned out so bad, but is swift to punish them savagely for living up to their natures. (Talk about setting someone up for failure.) Adam and Eve are tossed from the Garden of Eden, finding their way to a cave, and there they beget Cain and Abel. Writes Saramago, lowercasing his nouns, "Let us begin by clearing up certain malicious doubts about adam's ability to make a child when he was one hundred and thirty years old." Adam pulled it off, though, his offspring introducing murder to the list of human sins. Our eponymous Cain wanders into exile, accompanied by a semi-magical donkey (the Roman writer Apuleius seems to have stolen into the biblical mix) and has adventures aplenty. He's a ticked-off fellow too: Saramago tells us that he was a fratricide precisely because he was not a successful deicide, and he might have enjoyed a fine career conquering such ancient cities as Sodom and Nineveh had not God always been interfering. Cain is also self-aware, if constantly unable to read the deity's intentions; he offers himself up to God for the sacrifice God seems to be demanding, only to be made to live out his punishment for hundreds of years. Says a frustrated Cain, "I have learned one thing…That our god, the creator of heaven and earth, is completely mad." A pleasing, elegantly written allegory.

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May 15, 2011

Nobel Prize winner Saramago's final book (he died last year) reimagines the Old Testament story of Cain. This Cain moves through time from the story of Abraham and Isaac to Noah's Flood, forever encountering an unjust God. For all literati.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
In his highly intelligent but incontrovertibly alluring fiction, the late Portuguese Nobel laureate consistently presented himself as provocative and unpredictable, and this posthumous novel (he died in 2010) sustains all sides of his reputation. The novel's title names the primary character, and in the first few pages, it is obvious that this is a reinterpretation of the life of the fratricidal Cain, son of Adam and Eve and slayer of his brother, Abel. Saramago's humor and inventiveness never disappear from the reader's eyes as he, the ever-present narrator, posits early on that what follows is an instructive and definitive history of Cain, presented with all the meticulousness of a historian. The truth is it is not exactly that, but it is, at the same time, much more than that. What does in fact follow is an iconoclastic, imaginative roller-coaster ride as Cain whisks about through all the time levels of the Old Testament, witnessing the major events in those books of the Bible, from the fall of Sodom to the Flood, through his own perspective of God as cruel and vengeful. Cain and God have repeated one-on-one arguments, and at novel's end, we take ironic comfort from the impression that Cain and God will argue into eternity. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readership in this country for Saramago's work has been growing by leaps and bounds, and his latest novel is sure to attract his ever-expanding fan base.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)