Cain [Hardcover]

Jose Saramago (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: October 4, 2011

“Suitably disturbing—and a pleasure to read.” — The Scotsman

In this, his last novel, José Saramago daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Old Testament, recalling his provocative The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. His tale runs 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. Cain, the despised, the murderer, is Saramago’s protagonist.

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, the trials of Job. The rapacious Queen Lilith takes him as her lover. An old man with two sheep on a rope crosses his path. And 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.”

A startling book—sensual, funny—in all ways a fitting end to Saramago’s extraordinary career.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: In his final slim novel, the late José Saramago gives a cheeky modernist update to a timeworn biblical tale. After killing his brother Abel in an exasperated rage, Cain makes a deal with a CEO-like God and escapes with little more than a donkey and a few snacks, doomed to nomadic immortality. As he wanders through time and space, the handsome itinerant interferes with the dealings of a familiar cast of characters--Noah, Moses, Isaac--forever altering the course of legend along the way. Deeply flawed and all too human, despite the eternal life granted him, Cain also struggles openly with the idea of faith in the face of an equally flawed God. By turns philosophical and hilarious, Cain shows off the scope of Saramago’s talent and makes a fitting coda for a superlative writing life. --Mia Lipman

Review

"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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 4, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0547419899
• ISBN-13: 978-0547419893
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #73,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

JOSE SARAMAGO is one of the most acclaimed writers in the world today. He is the author of numerous novels, including All the Names, Blindness, and The Cave. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 60 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Subversive, Allegorical and Brilliant! September 5, 2011

By Elaine Campbell VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

This tour de force has got to be the most radically different kind of book since the creation of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (most likely a brother in spirit). This work, though, is more readable despite its encompassing stylistic forays into the no-no's of grammar and punctuation. What I'm saying is "Hold onto your hats, you've never read anything like it."

cain is the protagonist (and I purposely do not capitalize his name as no names are capitalized in the world of Jose Saramago, at least not in this story) and it is to be remembered that cain's extraordinary journey through the world of the Old Testament is pre-Biblical. He has no points of reference (no footnotes, no exegeses, no internet commentaries) but his own direct reactive experiences to the events he witnesses by some mysterious decree (even God is puzzled by its source).

And what events he witnesses (and even plays a main role in some of them)! After killing his brother, something which he never ceases to regret, God sentences him to wander the earth (a la the ocean's Flying Dutchman, but without any seven years' chance of redemption, however slim), and in his peregrinations he meets up with no less than Abraham, Joshua, Noah and witnesses the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, among other catastrophic events. Let's face it. He doesn't think much of God, and doesn't mind telling him so. God's opinion of cain is mutual. The unresolvedness of this shared state is at the heart of this story. And their differences of opinion perpetuate to this day.

Certainly the fact that Saramago was an atheist and a libertarian communist colored his weltanschauung. When the Portuguese government censored his book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, he relocated from his native country to the Canary Islands. Neither did he win a popularity contest with the Catholic Church.

Stylistically, the innovations in this book include paragraphs some running for many pages, commas to divide sentences, rather than periods, a new speaker denoted only by an initial capital letter of a word, names, as I mentioned, are not capitalized, yet some words, such as Mother and Father, are capitalized. At first it seems a bit puzzling, but as one reads on it becomes a flow of sorts, an interior drifting that eventually becomes appealing. I believe that because of these innovations, an intensity is sustained because of the scarcity of breaks (halts) in the narrative.

So here we've got a book by a genius, no doubt. As an allegory, I miss the well-rounded human, and yet reading it is kind of like getting a sock in the teeth. "Take that!" says Saramago.

With pleasure, replies the reader. At least this one.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Saramago on the Old Testament September 5, 2011

By H. F. Corbin TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Jose Saramago , it is safe to say, does not have much use for the god of the Old Testament. In his final novel, where there are no upper-case letters except for the words that start a sentence, he takes the reader on a journey with Cain after he was punished by God to be a wanderer and roam the earth after he killed his brother Abel. Through what the narrator calls "time travelling shifts," Cain is able to be a witness to and often a participant in some of the other events of the Old Testament: the Isaac and Abraham story, the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Joshua at Jericho, the plight of Job and Noah's ark and the Flood.

Saramago with wit and sarcasm fleshes out the Old Testament stories. He reminds the reader that the term "Adam's apple" came about because Mr. Adam got a piece of the forbidden fruit lodged in his throat , the fruit given to him by the "first lady." The narrator declares that "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."

People at the Tower of Babel, "without the aid of dictionaries or interpreters" are speaking in a confusing number of languages including, "who would have thought it, in portuguese," a nice touch on the part of the author. But he shines in his take on Noah and the Flood. The worker angels, whose task it is to get the ark afloat, relate to Cain just how boring heaven is with all the angels proclaiming the Lord's greatness. "It's high time that these. . . began to experience the simple joys of ordinary people." And if we are to interpret the word "flesh" broadly, shouldn't there be unicorns, the phoenix, the hippogryph, the centaur, the minotaur, the basilisk, the chimera and the donkey included in the roundup of the animals into the ark? (I personally was hoping that at least a pair of dinosaurs would make the cut!)

God is portrayed as vengeful, jealous, wicked; "he doesn't understand us and we don't understand him." When I finished this short novel (150 pages ) by one of the world's great writers, I thought of who would find Saramago's retelling of some of the stories from the Old Testament abominable. Certainly Pat Robertson comes to mind. Robert Frost, however, would love this book since he mused that if God would forgive his little joke on him, then he would certainly forgive God's big joke on him. David Lindsay, the author of the play "Rabbit Hole" would be a fan as well as he lets his character who lost a young son declare that if God just needed another angel, why wouldn't he just make one.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A testament to Saramago September 13, 2011

By switterbug TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

God is ineffable, say his disciples. In Saramago's recreation of the old testament, god is snide, foppish, vicious, capricious, puerile, contemptuous, crabby, and a slouch at multi-tasking (and no iconic capital letters for this merry band of pranksters). This short but adventure-packed novella presents a new twist on the story of cain, the fratricidal brother. Weed out all the boring parts of Genesis, feature all the greatest hits, and place cain as the ubiquitous character. Actually, cain even shows up at events that god is too distracted to attend (and his angels are stuck in traffic?).

In addition to being an erudite little gem, this story is full of slicing irony mixed with slapstick humor and dry, bone-dry, desert-dry wit. He's too subtle to just rant on the lord. Saramago seems to be peeking out of the corners of the pages, winking at the reader, offering a sly smile. As an arch example, Eve calls herself the First Lady of Paradise.

Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, was an ardent atheist, who said that the Bible is a handbook of bad morals. He also impugns a "cruel, jealous, and inhumane God (who) exists only in our heads." In 1992, a scandal erupted after The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was published, whose characterization of God didn't conform to certain pieties, so Saramago happily moved to the Spanish Canary Islands, where he lived until his death in 2010. He didn't think CAIN would offend Catholics, though, "because they don't read the Bible."

This is his final contribution to the world of literature. Although not his most superlative--by definition it is contained--it is still masterful, and had me laughing with glee at intervals. Check out his 1995 Blindness for a novel of unsurpassed beauty, staggering tragedy, and stunning redemption.