Caim in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Jun 01, 2015 Ryan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorite-authors, fiction, 2015

"Doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time"

Either I'm getting better at reading Saramago with his disdain for punctuation and paragraph breaks, or this book is super-short. Probably a little of both. Books like this that play around with biblical lore always draw me in, since so many of those stories were drilled into my head in my Catholic youth. This idea - to follow Cain after he is condemned to wander the world - is a clever one. We've all had moments of comparing our own fa ...more

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Oct 23, 2011 Jeff Scott rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, bible

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 orig 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

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