![]() ![]() “oh my god, murmured abraham and his voice was like a groan.” Cain retorts: “Yes, your god perhaps, but not theirs.” When Cain, puzzled, remarks on the anomaly, Abraham insists that the Lord would surely have kept his promise. He watches the Lord slaughter all those living in Sodom and Gomorrah even after assuring Abraham that he would spare any innocents found there. In Saramago’s telling, Cain witnesses most of the dramatic events in Genesis. ![]() After Abel’s murder, Cain argues that the Lord shares responsibility for the death because “you had the freedom to stop me killing abel, which was perfectly within your capabilities.” Although the Lord protests, ultimately he agrees that he bears part of the blame for Abel’s demise.Ĭain’s punishment for the murder is to wander forever as a vagabond. Although the story of Cain is still synonymous with evil, the book presents the Lord as at least as wicked the author’s lack of capitalization accentuates the parity between the two. It turns out that the novel focuses as much on God as it does on Cain, perhaps the original villain in Western literature. ![]() So what does a master writer near the end of his life, a professed nonbeliever, have to say about a seminal Biblical figure? Cain, his final novel, was published in 2009, the year before the author’s death the present translation is the novel’s first publication in the United States. He was known as a dedicated Communist and vehement atheist. José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, the first Portuguese writer to be so honored. ![]()
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