Cain in Around the World

Jul 24, 2015 Jibran rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nobel, god

The life of a god isn’t as easy as you think, said God to Cain.

When Cain meets an angel and enters into an argument about the oblation god has ordered Abraham to make of his own son, the angel, feeling trapped, mutters under his breath, Oh no, a rationalist, and tries to sneak away to complete the divine mission with which he’s charged. The angel might have turned a deaf ear to Cain’s cold logic, but you, the angelic reader, have no recourse but to subject yourself to his grilling.

The hero or an The life of a god isn’t as easy as you think, said God to Cain.

When Cain meets an angel and enters into an argument about the oblation god has ordered Abraham to make of his own son, the angel, feeling trapped, mutters under his breath, Oh no, a rationalist, and tries to sneak away to complete the divine mission with which he’s charged. The angel might have turned a deaf ear to Cain’s cold logic, but you, the angelic reader, have no recourse but to subject yourself to his grilling.

The hero or anti-hero of this story, depending on one’s point of view, is none but Cain, Adam’s other son, the first murderer, the embodiment of evil, transformed for the purpose into the author’s rationalist alter ego, shredding to bits the moral fabric Biblical history is made of, with the confidence of a devil and the precision of an infallible angel.

Saramago’s purpose here is not to tell us something new; we have heard all that before. Nor is there an attempt to engage the rationalist and the religionist on a profounder philosophical level. Instead, he takes to task the sacred and the revered through the felicitous agency of satire, just that this time it is caustic, hilarious, direct, with no attempt at subtlety, with a delicious tongue-smacking of an irreverent blasphemer, the title he earned for writing this story. In any case, it’s guaranteed to amuse you or enrage you, depending, again, on your point of view!

As I read on I couldn’t help recalling Voltaire’s Candide in which chance compels a young and intelligent man to traverse the earth in search of some universal dicta that would help him answer questions about life. Likewise our protagonist Cain, carrying a curse by god as punishment for unjustly killing his brother, is condemned to travel between places and ages, and like Machado de Assis’ Brás Cubas, he goes beyond the confines of human time to meet various Biblical characters and sees the history, as crystallised in the Old Testament, unfold before his sinful eyes.

Be it Moses’ genocidal campaigns on god’s behest or the gambler’s wager between god and satan for Job’s test of patience, whether it’s the total annihilation of Sodom & Gomorrah for – guess what – homosexuality or the essentially immoral tale of god, like an insane ruler, ordering Abraham to put to sword his own son as a “test” of his faith, the more Cain goes around the more evidence he sees of god’s wickedness and irrationality, amazed at the games he plays with humans he created to prove his superiority and uniqueness, perhaps in a bawdy attempt to escape his own ennui or to placate his inflated divine ego. On the last stop in Cain’s journey before the curtain falls he meets Noah and hears of god’s grand plan to destroy all of humanity except Noah’s family and those who manage to clamber upon the ark. Turning over in his head the mountain of evidence of god’s evil ways Cain tells Noah:

“I have learned one thing, What’s that, That our god, the creator of heaven and earth, is completely mad, …innocent are now accustomed to paying for the sinners, the lord seems to have a very strange idea of justice, the idea of someone who hasn’t the slightest notion of what human justice might be.”

All in all, there are lots of chuckles and gasps to be had here, in signature Saramago style.

August 2015 ...more

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Jun 27, 2012 Beth rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books, around-the-world-group, audiobooks

This was Nobelist José Saramago's last novel. He went out with a great one. This book is laugh out loud funny. Depending on your religious leanings, this may not be for you, since the novel has at its core a sense of outrage with the God of the Hebrew Bible. The tale begins in the Garden of Eden, and we quickly know that something is up. The text is very tongue-in-cheek about "the lord" from the start. Here is a little taste of the narrative, from early in the tale, about an incident with which This was Nobelist José Saramago's last novel. He went out with a great one. This book is laugh out loud funny. Depending on your religious leanings, this may not be for you, since the novel has at its core a sense of outrage with the God of the Hebrew Bible. The tale begins in the Garden of Eden, and we quickly know that something is up. The text is very tongue-in-cheek about "the lord" from the start. Here is a little taste of the narrative, from early in the tale, about an incident with which you are undoubtedly already familiar: 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 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 obeyed 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 have 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.

We learn the back story of the murder of Abel, and find that the blame is not solely Cain's. Here his philosophical battle with God commences. Once Cain is condemned to his wandering, he finds himself traveling not only through space, but also through time. He finds himself becoming embroiled in a number of Biblical events, among them the golden cow incident at Sinai, the battle of Jericho, the trials of Job, and the condemnation of Sodom. In each of these events, he is offended by the sense of God toying with humankind for His own egotistical purposes.

This is a VERY funny book, which takes on the issues of good and evil and of the just use of power. It pokes fun at human nature time and again along the way. José Saramago didn't lose a bit of his rhetorical skill or his wit at the end. He certainly does not deserve the final judgement he described in Cain, at which everyone will be condemned, either for doing too much or too little. Saramago gets it just right. Hopefully the lord will appreciate the critique and spare him. ...more

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Jul 17, 2022 Shriya rated it really liked it · review of another edition

For a book this hard-hitting and a satire as good as this, it's quite surprising that not a lot of people have read it at all or even heard of it.
That being said, Caín took a long time to finish for me also! I've had this book as a first edition, literally days after Saramago passed away and it took me quite sometime to move beyond Chapter 3 and get to Chapter 13 and personally, it's probably for the best because I am sure I wouldn't have gone through some of the same questions that Caín asks i ...more

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