Kali J Desautels

❤️❤️❤️

José Saramago’s short novel Cain is a fictionalized version of the life of the Biblical Cain (Cain and Abel), the son of Adam and Eve, from before his birth, when his parents were expelled from the Garden of Eden to his undoing, after the story of Noah and his ark. Saramago interlaces Cain through all the stories of the Old Testament, ignoring chronology, and in fact proclaiming several times that as Cain travels through his life, time has little meaning and he is neither in the future, nor the past, but rather concurrent presents. While written as though in biblical times (pre-Christian), the novel employs techniques, events and verbiage that would be far from invented at the time. An example of this is when the Angel from the Lord’s host is late to stop Abraham from sacrificing his only son Isaac as a test from God, he tells Cain that it was because he had had a mechanical failure in his right wing and had flown around in circles for a while. It goes without saying that pre-common era angels were unlikely to have mechanical wings. In multiple instances, Saramago’s narrator breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader, telling us that while ‘of course these conversations did not occur, the thoughts behind them most certainly would have’. Cain spends a goodly amount of time questioning God and wondering why he was punished for killing Abel, whilst God tortures Job as a wager with Satan, and is the cause of the deaths of the children of Sodom and Gomorrah and does not face any sort of retribution. Saramago’s God is more arrogant, negligent father than loving Almighty, and throughout the reading of Cain he demonstrated how in different stories from the Old Testament, God proves to have succumbed to the Seven Deadly Sins. The ending of the novel had a twist that I did not expect, and the themes presented were very clever and interesting. The humour is biting, leaving the reader feeling ever so slightly sacrilegious for having read it, though as a Christian, I did not feel offended; rather I was impressed. (159 pages)

Further – the only reason this book scored 3 and not 4 ❤️s is that I struggle with José Saramago’s unique style of punctuation. It causes the editor in me to cringe.

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