“What about the children,” he asks, “surely the children were innocent”. Cain struggles with the existential questions: how can a just God allow - or even inflict - suffering? Why test those you say you love? And just how can someone who basically invented human nature be dense enough to set up that whole Tree of Knowledge thing, anyway?Ĭain is particularly upset over god's destruction of the city of Sodom, especially after declaring he found not a single innocent person living there. Much of the slim novel (159 pages) consists of debates between cain and god over just how omnipotent the Creator really is, as well as how fair. Refusing to capitalize all of his character's names appears to be just another way that the author places his human characters on an equal footing with the divine figures in the story. The deliberate lack of capitalization, combined with vintage Saramago irony, is indicative of cain's disdain for the omnipotent being who has condemned him to wander the Earth forever, marked by the ugly brand that identifies him as his brother's killer. The central character in the novel, however - besides cain - is God – or “god,” as Saramago writes him. In its citation, the Nobel Foundation described him as a writer “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.” True to form, Cain is an imaginative journey into a world where Adam and Eve, various angels, Abraham, Noah, Moses and Job all dwell, sharing the landscape with “cain” by virtue of a time-shifting reality facilitated in part by a handsome donkey. Saramago, who died in 2010, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. Nobel prize-winner José Saramago has built his novel, Cain, around the scaffolding of that original tale – and then populated it with other figures from the Old Testament. The name Cain is, of course, synonymous with fratricide, thanks to the biblical story in Genesis that describes the world's deadliest sibling squabble.

Cain saramago review