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For several weeks now, I had the review of "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" "in the barrel," but I believe that when you can't manage to vomit something decent in a handful of minutes, it's best to move on to something else. I haven't moved much, though. In fact, while the aforementioned work was a personal revisitation of the New Testament, the book I want to talk to you about today, "Cain," instead focuses on the Old.
Saramago, with the usual skill, turns the figure of the Lord, of God, inside out like a sock, confronting it with that of the fratricide Cain. He is condemned to wander for eternity, and it is the perpetual wandering, across different temporal presents, that allows the protagonist of the novel, sometimes in the first person and in other cases as a mere spectator, to experience historical events of the Old Testament. A rather daring comparison between this ignoble murderer and the great creator: a Kraft single slice at the sight of a magnificent stinky French cheese. Yet these biblical episodes, which Cain will describe with acumen and detail, will be able to lay bare the true nature of God, reduced almost to a rebellious teenager unable to resist the temptation to play with humanity. A lord, like a little boy intent on playing with an insect before subjecting it to the most cruel and gratuitous suffering (the destruction of Sodom, the construction of the Tower of Babel, the massacres by Joshua's army, the trials inflicted on Job, etc...) with a single and swift movement of the fingers. Using the historical basis, then revisited, of the Old Testament, Saramago picks up a pickaxe: by the end of the book he will have hands full of blisters and a pile of stones at his feet!
The murderous wanderer is then progressively humanized, and as the novel progresses, we feel increasingly akin to him; we share his sufferings, feelings of remorse, and angry judgment towards the cynical creator who appears more and more as an out-of-place character devoid of personality: incapable of giving meaning and logic to what it has generated, which seems to have the blurry outlines of chance, of a fortuitous experiment. Cain fosters such an enormous sense of revenge that in the end Saramago will find a way to satisfy it with a disconcerting finale, as is customary, without appeal.
Written at the venerable age of 88, just one year before his death, it's a sharp and uncomfortable text which, while it can be consumed peacefully in just one afternoon, has an explosive impact force, a sarcastic irony at times hilarious (see the "Creation" passage) and an uncommon expository brilliance. Certainly, these 140 pp. may come across as heretical to a bigoted person, at best blasphemous and indigestible, but the form and strength of the message it sends cannot really be questioned, not even by a "vehement zealot."
After reading, thanks to DeBaser, nine novels in just over a year, I believe that the moderate length of the text—usually many of Saramago's books have a visual impact capable of deterring most—combined with the pleasantness of the plot, makes "Cain" a particularly suitable work to get to know an author who, in the years to come, we will miss greatly.
I therefore invite you, once again, to passionately make love with her vast and granite bibliography.
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