Cain: A Novel

By José Saramago and Margaret Jull Costa

A “winkingly blasphemous retelling of the Old Testament” by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gospel According the Jesus Christ (The New Yorker).

In José Saramago final novel, he daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Old Testament. Placing the despised murderer Cain in the role of protagonist, this epic tale ranges from the Garden of Eden, when God realizes he has forgotten to give Adam and Eve the gift of speech, to the moment when Noah’s Ark lands on the dry peak of Ararat.

Condemned to wander forever after he kills his brother Abel, Cain makes his way through the world in the company of a personable donkey. He is a witness to and participant in the stories of Isaac and Abraham, the destruction of the Tower of Babel, Moses and the golden calf, and the trials of Job. Again and again, Cain encounters a God whose actions seem callous, cruel, and unjust. He confronts Him, he argues with Him. “And one thing we know for certain,” Saramago writes, “is that they continued to argue and are arguing still.”

"Cain's vagabond journey builds to a stunning climax that, like the book itself, is a fitting capstone to a remarkable career."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

This ebook includes a sample chapter of Jose Saramago’s Blindness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9780547519401

José Saramago

JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Book preview

First Mariner Books edition 2012

Copyright © 2009 by José Saramago & Editorial Caminho, SA, Lisbon, by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin, Inh. Nicole Witt e.K., Frankfurt am Main, Germany

English translation copyright © 2011 by Margaret Jull Costa

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

First published with the title Caim in 2009 by Editorial Caminho, SA, Lisbon

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Harvill Secker Random House

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Saramago, José.

[Caim. English]

Cain / José Saramago; translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-41989-3 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-547-84017-8 (pbk.)

1. Cain (Biblical figure)—Fiction. 2. Bible. O.T.—History of Biblical events—Fiction. I. Costa, Margaret Jull. II. Title.

PQ9281.A66C3513 2011

869.3'42—dc23

eISBN 978-0-547-51940-1

v3.0315

This publication was assisted by a grant from the Direcçâo-Geral do Livro e das Bibliotecas / Portugal

For Pilar, of course

By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent

sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness

that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts:

and by it he being dead yet speaketh.

—Hebrews 11:4 Book of Nonsense

1

WHEN THE LORD, also known as god, realized that adam and eve, although perfect in every outward aspect, could not utter a word or make even the most primitive of sounds, he must have felt annoyed with himself, for there was no one else in the garden of eden whom he could blame for this grave oversight, after all, the other animals, who were, like the two humans, the product of his divine command, already had a voice of their own, be it a bellow, a roar, a croak, a chirp, a whistle or a cackle. In an excess of rage, surprising in someone who could have solved any problem simply by issuing another quick fiat, he rushed over to adam and eve and unceremoniously, no half-measures, stuck his tongue down the throats of first one and then the other. From the texts which, over the centuries, have provided a somewhat random record of those remote times, be it of events that might, at some future date, be awarded canonical status and others deemed to be the fruit of apocryphal and irredeemably heretical imaginations, it is not at all clear what kind of tongue was being referred to here, whether the moist, flexible muscle that moves around in the buccal cavity and occasionally outside it too, or the gift of speech, also known as language, that the lord had so regrettably forgotten to give them and about which we know nothing, since not a trace of it remains, not even a heart engraved on the bark of a tree, accompanied by some sentimental message, something along the lines of I love eve. It’s likely that the lord’s violent assault on his offspring’s silent tongues had another motive, namely, given that, in principle, you can’t have one without the other, that of putting them in contact with the deepest depths of their physical being, the so-called perturbations of the inner self, so that, in future, they could, with some authority, speak of those dark and labyrinthine disquiets out of whose window, the mouth, their tongues were already peering. Well, anything is possible. With the praiseworthy scrupulousness of any skilled craftsman, making up with due humility for his earlier negligence, the lord wanted to make sure that his mistake had been corrected, and so he asked adam, What’s your name, and the man replied, I’m adam, your first-born. Then the creator turned to the woman, And what is your name, I’m Eve, the first lady, she replied rather unnecessarily, since there was no other. The lord was satisfied and bade farewell with a fatherly See you later, then, and went about his business. And, for the first time, adam said to eve, Let’s go to bed.

Seth, their third child, will only come into the world one hundred and thirty years later, not because his mother’s womb required that amount of time to complete the making of a new descendant, but because the gonads of father and mother, the testes and ovaries respectively, had taken more than a century to mature and to develop sufficient generative power. It must be pointed out to our more impatient readers, first, that the fiat was given once and once only, second, that men and women are not sausage machines, and, third, that hormones are very complicated things, they can’t just be produced from one day to the next, nor can they be found in pharmacies or supermarkets, you have to let matters take their course. Before seth came into the world, cain had already arrived, followed, shortly afterwards, by abel. By the way, one must not underestimate the intense boredom of all those years spent without neighbors, without distractions, without some small child crawling about between kitchen and living room, with no other visitors but the lord, and even his visits were few and very brief, interspersed by long intervals of absence, ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty years, so we can easily imagine that the sole occupants of that earthly paradise must have felt like poor orphans abandoned in the forest of the universe, not that they would have been able to explain what the words orphan and abandoned meant. It’s true that every now and then, although again not with any great frequency, adam would say to eve, Let’s go to bed, but their conjugal routine, aggravated, in their case, due to inexperience, by the complete lack of alternative positions to adopt, proved to be as destructive as an invasion of woodworm to a roof beam. You hardly notice anything from the outside, just a little dust here and there falling from tiny holes, but, inside, it’s quite a different matter, and the collapse of something that had seemed so sturdy will not be long in coming. In such situations, there are those who say that a child can have an enlivening effect, if not on the libido, which is the work of chemicals far more complex than merely learning how to change a diaper, then at least on feelings, which, you must admit, is no small gain. As for the lord and his sporadic visits, the first was to see if adam and eve had had any problems setting up house, the second to find out what benefits they had gleaned from their experience of country life and the third to warn them that he would not be back for a while, because he had to do the rounds of the other paradises that exist in the heavens. Indeed, he would not appear again until much later, on a date that has not been recorded, in order to expel the unhappy couple from the garden of eden for the heinous crime of having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This episode, which gave rise to the first definition of a hitherto unknown concept, original sin, has never been satisfactorily explained. Firstly, even the most rudimentary of intelligences would have no difficulty in grasping that being properly informed about something is always preferable to being ignorant, especially in such delicate matters as good and evil, which could put anyone at risk, quite unwittingly, of being consigned to eternal damnation in a hell that had not yet been invented. Secondly, the lord showed a lamentable lack of foresight, because if he really didn’t want them to eat that fruit, it would have been easy enough simply not to have planted the tree or to have put it somewhere else or surrounded it with barbed wire. Thirdly, it wasn’t because they had disobeyed god’s instructions that adam and eve discovered they were naked. They were already stark naked when they went to bed, and if the lord had never noticed such an evident lack of modesty, the fault must lie with a father’s blindness, an apparently incurable infliction that prevents us from seeing that our children are, after all, neither better nor worse than all the others.

A point of order. Before we continue with this instructive and definitive history of cain, undertaken with unprecedented boldness, it might be advisable to introduce some clarity into the chronology of events. So, 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. At first sight, if we stick to the fertility indices of modern times, no, he clearly wouldn’t, but during the world’s infancy, those same one hundred and thirty years would have represented a vigorous adolescence that not even the most precocious of casanovas would have sneered at. It is, moreover, worth remembering that adam lived until he was nine hundred and thirty years old, thus narrowly missing being drowned in the great flood, for he died when lamech was still alive, lamech being the father of noah, the future builder of the ark. He would, therefore, have had the time and leisure to make all the children he did make and many more if he had so wished. As we said earlier, adam’s second child, born after cain, was abel, a handsome, fair-haired boy, who, having been the object of the best proofs of the lord’s esteem, met a very sticky end indeed. The third child, as we also said, was called seth, but he will not form part of this narrative, which we are writing step by step with all the meticulousness of a historian, and so we’ll leave him here, just a name and nothing more. There are those who say that the idea of creating a religion was born in his head, but we have given abundant attention to such ticklish matters in the past, with reprehensible levity, according to some experts, and in terms that will doubtless prove deleterious to us when it comes to the final judgment at which everyone will be condemned, either for doing too much or too little. We are only interested now in the family of which father adam is the head, although he proved to be a very bad head, and we really can’t put it any other way, since all it took was for his wife to offer him the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and our illogical first patriarch, after a certain amount of persuasion, more for appearance’s sake than out of any real conviction, duly choked on it, leaving us men marked forever by that irritating piece of apple that will neither go up nor down. There are also those who say that the reason adam didn’t manage to swallow the whole of that fateful fruit was because the lord suddenly turned up, demanding to know what was going on. Now before we forget about it completely or before our continuation of the story renders the fact redundant because it comes too late, we will tell you about the stealthy, almost clandestine visit the lord made to the garden of eden one hot summer night. As usual, adam and eve were sleeping, naked, beside each other, not touching, a deceptively edifying image of the most perfect innocence. They did not wake up, and the lord did not wake them either. He had gone there with the intention of correcting a slight flaw, which, as he had finally realized, seriously marred his creations, and that flaw, can you believe it, was the lack of a navel. The pale skin of his babies, untouched by the gentle sun of paradise, was too naked, too vulnerable, and in a way obscene, if that word existed then. Quickly, in case they should wake up, god reached out and very lightly pressed adam’s belly with the tip of his forefinger, making a rapid circling movement, and there was a navel. The same procedure, carried out on eve, produced similar results, with the one important difference that her navel was much better as regards design, shape and the delicacy of its folds. This was the last time that the lord looked upon his work and saw that it was good.

Fifty years and one day after this fortunate surgical intervention, which gave rise to a new era in the aesthetics of the human body under the consensual motto that everything about it can always be improved, disaster struck. With a crack of thunder, the lord appeared. He was dressed differently from usual, in keeping perhaps with what would become the new imperial fashion in heaven, wearing a triple crown on his head and wielding a scepter as if it were a cudgel. I am the lord, he cried, I am he. A mortal silence fell over the garden of eden, not a sound, not even the buzz of a wasp, the barking of a dog, the trilling of a bird, or the trumpeting of an elephant. Nothing, only the chattering of a flock of starlings that had congregated in a leafy olive tree, there since the garden was first created, and which suddenly took flight as one, so many, hundreds, if not thousands of them, that they nearly obscured the sky. Who has disobeyed my orders, who has eaten of the fruit of my tree, asked god, fixing adam with a look that can only be described as coruscating, a word which, though highly expressive, has sadly fallen out of use. In desperation, the poor man tried in vain to swallow the telltale piece of apple, but his voice refused to come out, neither fore nor aft. Answer, said the angry voice of the lord, who was brandishing his scepter in a most threatening manner. Plucking up his courage, and conscious of how wrong it was to put the blame on someone else, adam said, The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of that tree and I did eat. The lord turned on the woman and asked, What is this that you have done, The serpent beguiled me and I did eat, Liar, deceiver, there are no serpents in paradise, Lord, I did not say that there were serpents in paradise, but I did have a dream in which a serpent appeared to me, saying, So god has forbidden you to eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, and I said no, that wasn’t true, that the only tree whose fruit we could not eat was the one that grows in the middle of paradise, for we would die if we touched it, Serpents can’t speak, at most they hiss, said the lord, The serpent in my dream spoke, And may one know what else the serpent said, asked the lord, trying to give the words a mocking tone that ill accorded with the celestial dignity of his robes, The serpent said that

Reviews for Cain

[paul9the9well9read · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Beginning with his murder of his brother, Abel, Cain, son of Adam and Eve, begins his God-imposed exile through the major stories of the Old Testament of the Bible. Cain participates in some events and merely observes others, but in each, he is led to the conclusions that the "god" represented by each story is inconsistent with the "god" Christians profess to believe in. Rather than a kind, merciful, loving god, Cain finds a god of trivial caprices, unreasonable angers, incredible cruelty, manifest injustices and trivial human vanity.
The book is never "preachy", never presented as an atheist's view of religion. Instead, it presents the stories and contexts of the Old Testament in ways that reveal that the god of faith is not the god the Bible presents him to be.
While I liked the book and its storyline, I deplore the modernist fashion of ignoring standard English syntax, rules of grammar, or standard punctuation. For example, there is a lot of dialog in the book, but not one single quotation mark. A bunch of words may start with a capital letter and end with a period many lines later, but between these two, two speakers may converse, a descriptive segment may occur and various narration may be included, yet these are not separated and little punctuation is used to help the reader make sense of the grammatical structure.
This may be an innovative and modern way to write--I have seen it in other contemporary writings lately--but it serves no positive purpose and causes the reader to work to hard in order to extract meaning from the page.
I would read this Nobel Prize winning author again based on his material, but I will not do so because of this unnecessary and unproductive abandonment of effective grammar and mechanics.

[charlescf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Although I consider myself very religious, I enjoyed this book. Its explicit sacrilege comes across as charming but nonetheless thought-provoking. The prose is intelligent and witty, although Saramago makes little use of punctuation and other conventional rules of grammar. Cain quickly becomes a dynamic, relatable, and likable character, eternally bickering with a very entertaining caricature of God. Punished with immortality for reactively killing his brother Abel, Saramago's brilliantly-written protagonist Cain wanders through several familiar Biblical stories. Each tale is retold with humour and wit, twisting minor details to have a major effect on the overall tone of the story. There are times where the book becomes painfully aware of the Bible's eccentricities, sometimes escalating into an intellectual critique. I love this book, and I'd recommend it to anyone, religious or otherwise.

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A clever, funny reimagining of stories from Genesis.

[hayduke_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was a joy to read, and I think it's the kind of book that begs to be reread. By the title the reader knows the subject of the book: Cain slew his brother Abel, and was cursed by the lord to wander the land until he died a natural death. Cain rides his little donkey through various "future presents," witnessing events such as the fall of Jericho, and the building of the tower of Babel. Cain is there to grab Abraham's arm before he can go through with his crazy act of faith, and slay his own son. Saramago uses Cain as his biblical critic, arguing with God about who should and should not be slaughtered when He decides to obliterate the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I would recommend this book to heretics with some biblical knowledge, such as Sunday School in your younger years. Open-minded believers with a sense of humor should also find pleasure reading this little gem. Saramago has given us a fine last novel full of humor and insight that I will be happy to add to my bookshelves.

[rmckeown_9 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

José Saramago won the Nobel Prize in 1998. Cain is his last novel. While it takes a bit of effort to get used to his style, his books are a lot of fun and well-worth the effort. In The Stone Raft, a geologist discovers a fissure in the Pyrenees Mountains. He returns for further investigation to find the gap has widened. Eventually, Spain and Portugal break off from Europe and float out into the Atlantic Ocean, narrowly missing the Canary Islands. Blindness is a retelling of Camus’ novel, The Plague, and All the Names involves a clerk in a registry office who becomes obsessed with a card accidentally removed from drawer. Cain recounts the story following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and the murder of Abel. Marked by the Lord and condemned to wander the earth, Cain slingshots from various places and time periods to witness events in the Old Testament. He sees Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son, Isaac; he sees the remains of the Tower of Babel; he hitches a ride on Noah’s Ark; he spends some time working for Job, until his fortunes take a downturn; Cain spends some time with Joshua before the trumpets blare; and he is present when Moses comes down from the mountain. In all of these encounters, Cain questions the actions and motives of God.At the conclusion of the novel, when Noah tries to complete the Ark on time and in budget, God sends an army of angels to assist with the construction. Cain engages them in a conversation about the Lord. The following passage is reproduced exactly as printed to give an idea of Saramago’s style. Cain establishes a friendly bond with some of the angels, who claim, “happiness on earth was far superior to that in heaven, but the lord, of course, being a jealous god, must never know this, because if he did, such seditious thoughts would merit the severest of reprisals with no regard for the perpetrators’ angelic status” (144). He likes long sentences and he is stingy about paragraphing and capitalization.Cain replies, "if they really thought that, once this humanity had been destroyed, the race that followed would not fall into the same errors, the same temptations, the same follies and crimes, and they answered, We are mere angels, we know little about the incomprehensible charade that you call human nature, but to be perfectly frank, we don’t see how the second experiment will be any more satisfactory than the first, which ended in the long string of miseries we see before us now, in short, in our honest opinion as angels, and considering all the evidence, we don’t believe that human beings deserve life” (144-45).The dust jacket quotes John Updike on the author. “Saramago is a writer, like Faulkner, so confident of his resources and ultimate destination that he can bring any improbability to life.” I am in complete agreement. José Saramago’s Cain is a fun, thought-provoking, and interesting rational look at some of the best-loved stories of the Old Testament – a great place to begin exploring this amazing author. Five stars.--Jim, 4/12/13

[ffortsa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, it's short. And it's clever. And I don't mind having to work to figure out who is on what side of the conversation, since he doesn't give you many hints, but the conversations are good. Saramango retells the story of Cain more or less from Cain's point of view, and then sets Cain off to wander not only the land but the various times of the Old Testament history, to demonstrate that the Old Testament god was a nasty, brutish, arbitrary tyrant. OK, I got it about a third of the way through. Although it ends with a clever piece of alternate biblical history, the book is repetitive and polemical, and although I am not a believer in any traditional sense, it made me cranky.

[bsiemens_2 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The book started as an irreverent reframing of the Biblical creation story. I hoped that this would set the tone for an interesting story about Cain. Instead the author used Cain's enforced wandering to drag the reader through a survey of Genesis like it might be told by an angry drunk, who perceives himself to be a wit. It was humorous for a dozen pages; it got old after sixty-six pages. I gave up.

[shadowofthewind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Most classic literature, from Beowulf to Dracula, traces the origin of evil back to Cain. Cain, the first murderer who slew his brother Abel, created the dragon in Beowulf and vampires with Lilith. Saramago decides to uses Cain as a character retelling many biblical tales, often in an irreverent way. Just like John Gardener’s Grendel, Saramago tells Cain story from his perspective. A man who sees God as just as much as a jealous hearted murderer as he, if not more so. We follow the Biblical origin story from Adam and Eve’s casting out of Paradise through the flood of Noah. Saramago’s mocking, questioning style, brings humor and irreverence to this sacred story. Questioning God’s motives throughout as well as making suggestive remarks about other characters that may be less than holy. (He even makes the suggestion that Eve slept with Azazel to get fruit from the Garden of Eden after they were cast out). Cain also moves back and forward in time so that Saramago can examine and dissect certain biblical stories and question their veracity, jokes often at the expense of God. A great examination of the moody, jealous God from the Old Testament, much of this ground has been covered by atheists and liberals going back to Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. Saramago’s story is far funnier, but goes much darker than most. It reminded me too much of a Harlan Ellison short story from Angry Candy, The Region Between. The ending was a bit extreme for my taste, but the story leading up to it was very enjoyable. Favorite Passages:“The lord had made some very bad choices when it came to inaugurating the garden of eden, in this particular game of roulette everyone had lost, in this target practice for the blind no one had scored. Of course, eve and adam could always have another child to make up for the loss of their murdered son, but how sad to be someone with no other goal in life than to keep making children without knowing why or for what purpose. In order to propagate the species, say those who believe in a final objective, in an ultimate reason, although they have no idea what those might be and have never bothered to ask themselves why the species should keep being propagated as if it were the universe’s one last hope. Cain has already given his answer by killing abel because he could not kill the lord. Things do not auger well for the future life of this man.” P. 28“Like everything else, words have their whys and wherefores. Some call to us solemnly, arrogantly, giving themselves airs, as if they were destined for great things, and then it turns out that they were nothing more than a breeze too light even to set the sail of a windmill moving, whereas other ordinary, habitual words, the sort you use every day, end up having consequences no one would have dared predict, they weren’t born for that and yet they shook the world.” P. 43“The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him.” P. 78

[paulb_46 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fantastic rewriting of the Old Testament, using the figure of Cain as the wandering Jew, who like a time-bandit is able to weave in and out of the storyline. Wonderful rewrite of the story of Abraham and Issac.

[bibleblaster · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This provided an interesting, if unexpected, companion volume to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. They covered similar material in exposing the decidedly UNjust and UNloving actions of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. Saramago has Cain travel back and forth in time (after the infamous murder of his brother, Abel) to encounter God and God's works at many pivotal points (e.g. Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, Noah's ark, Joshua and the battle of Jericho, etc.) I love this kind of literary midrash, but I did find myself wishing for just a bit of humor, even dark humor, a la Christopher Moore. I don't think it would have taken anything from Saramgo's outrage and may have invited more readers in. This was the first novel I've read by Saramago, and turns out to be the last novel he ever wrote. I'll read more...

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting book. Although this is technically Saramago's last novel, I'm not willing to say goodbye to him just yet!

A wry witty excoriation of the earlier parts of the Bible, from Adam and Eve to Noah, and much more. Rhythmic and hilarious and mocking. Deep meaning and allegory and page-long paragraphs with not even a stop for punctuation.

[msaucier818 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is the latest in a string of books I have read that I have not really enjoyed. Saramago was an atheist in real life, and this book is a "reimagining" of some of the stories of the Old Testament with the title character Cain being the center of novel. While I appreciated some of the cynicism and the sarcasm, it wore on me after a while. I think the first part of the story best made his point, but as the book moved along I thought the author took too many liberties with the Bible stories. A quick read but certainly not recommended to anyone who is a believer in Christianity.

[noronhavaz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What if God was not benevolent? The start of Saramago’s last novel starts with a very strong push to Catholicism. Focusing on the Old Testament, it portrays a vengeful God, much as depicted in some actions of the Bible. While Cain assists in the different ventures brought by the Old Testament, Gods imperfections become clear, as the Nobel Prize winner manages to combine apographic content with the scholastic theological writings. Overall, the book contemplates a Darwinian vision of evolution, while maintaining an astonishing sense of humor of life. This book relentlessly explores only two possibilities: Either your faith is strong enough to encompass the Saramago’s Cain as a marvelous satire, or, one is open minded enough and has the wits to tolerate a broader perspective within the interpretations. Either way, the book is a very different piece of work, which is highly recommended for the prepared reader.

[spbooks_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely fascinating and very, very controversial - especially would be for fundamentalist Christians and, maybe, moderate Christians. Offers some very biting critique of a literalistic reading of some Old Testament stories. Didn't like the writing style, which was essentially grammar and punctuation free. I assume this was because it reflects the nature of Hebrew text. Got used to it after awhile. Very thought-provoking and, sometimes, confronting. Highly recommend for anyone with an open mind.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

at first it was hard to take because it seemed so sacrilegious. But by the end I thought it was pretty descriptive of man. We are always arguing with God and seeing ourselves as more righteous and more God than God. This book may actually provoke some to read the Bible and yes, I think it is pretty hard for us to understand the God of the Old Testament. I think I agree with Aga, this may not be his best book and I wonder if it was a bad place to start with Saramago. One thing that I really liked was Saramago mentions that Adam almost lived to the time of Noah. I had only recently come to realize that when I was reading Genesis at the first of this year. Saramago knows his Bible as he would need to do to write this satire.

[bibliophile_pgh · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A retelling of sorts of the Old Testament through Cain as he walks through the biblical Middle East as well as through time. He points out some of the fallacies in the Bible. This book is one of the reasons that Jose Saramago is one of my favorite authors.

[katchoo_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

myth, religion, fantasy, society, read in 2010

[annbury_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A short novel dealing with a big subject, that being the relationship between man and God -- or more accurately western man and the Judeo-Christian God. The title identifies the protagonist: Cain, who murdered his brother Abel, and was cursed by God to be a "fugitive and wanderer". The novel traces his wanderings, through the landscape (temporal as well as physical) of the Torah. Cain is present at the destruction of the Tower of Babel, at the worshipping of the Golden Calf, at the obliteration of Sodom and Gomorrah, etc. etc. etc. On the occasions, Cain condemns God's behavior, in making the innocent suffer along with the guilty. God does not come off particularly well in these exchanges, while Cain seems a sort of Prometheus, an advocate of humane behavior on the part of the divine. All in all, this is an interesting take on a very old question, as well as a story that holds the reader's interest. It sent me back to my Bible (yes, those horrors really are "by the Book"). and will probably send me back to Saramago

[caropg_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Originally posted at: A Girl that Likes BooksThis is the third book I read from Saramago, and I think we can safely say that I like his style. I realize that the absence of paragraphs, the dialogues that are not visually separated, etc, are not for everyone, but I think once you get used to it, you can read it as any other book.The story starts, not with Cain and Abel, but with Adam and Eve, this is the first time Saramago presents to us his version of god, one that will talk to his creations just as you and I would talk. Then, as most of us know, they get kicked out of Paradise, and after several years Cain, Abel and Seth come to the scene. After killing his brother, Cain is punished by god with a mark in his forehead and he is condemned to wander. The trick is that he won’t wonder just around, he will travel “in time” from biblical story to biblical situation. He will fall in love with Lilith, he will stop Abraham before killing his only son and he will be there in Noah’s Ark. All through the book, Cain will criticize god, for his acts, his reasoning, etc. He even points out that this god that everyone is following is a jealous god, full of anger and grudges. There is a moment when he is talking with god and the later says: “Some deny my existence […] they are out of my law, of my reach, I cannot touch them”.If it hasn’t been obvious to you by reading his prior books, this should be clear enough. Saramago is quite critical of the image that Catholic Church gives people to believe in. I haven’t read The Gospel according to Jesus Christ but in Death without interruptions you can already see a lot of critics, not only to society itself (also a recurrent theme in his work) but to the church itself. Through Cain’s voice Saramago even accuses god to be “crazy and without a conscious”I like the book a lot. I know it doesn’t necessarily show when you consider how long it took me (again people, I needed to sleep!) It was quirky, funny, satirical…it was fun to read, even though I kept feeling my grandma wouldn’t like me enjoying the book so much (she is really attached to the church still).I loved the following sentence: “Progress […] is inevitable, fatal as death. And life” Every time that I read one of his books, I end up with a list of sentences that stuck to me, and that’s good, that means (for me) that the book went deeper inside of you than you thought. However, I don’t think it was as good as Death with Interruptions, and that’s why this one is getting one mushroom less. I think is a lovely way to finish an amazing career, short and sweet

[danielstj · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a great literary fiction book. It details the inception, actions, and journey of the biblical figure of Cain. The style is very strong and manages to lend a lot to the tale that Saramago allows to develop. I found myself absolutely absorbed in this work and unable to put it down. It was, truly, a fine creation and one that I'm sure will stick with me despite the fact that I am not religious in any kind of way. This is worth it for those interested in world literature or the Nobel laureates.4.5 stars- FULLY deserved.