In José Saramago final novel, he daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Old Testament. Saramago’s angry caricature of the Hebrew Bible recalls public statements by the author tracing actions of the modern State of Israel to the Book of Deuteronomy and declaring Israel guilty of “a crime comparable to Auschwitz.” Cain is an unworthy last testament by the 1998 Nobel Prize laureate for literature.A “ winkingly blasphemous retelling of the Old Testament” by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gospel According the Jesus Christ ( The New Yorker). He even invents a carnally insatiable queen in the desert who makes the narrator her sex slave. His reasoning depends upon a naïve literalism, and he is fascinated by such things as the excrement from the animals on Noah’s Ark. Such arguments might have been fresh in the 18th century, but Saramago’s invective is neither innovative nor sophisticated his polemics and preoccupations resemble those of a rebellious 14-year-old. He prefers to trust the rationality of human beings.

To Cain, God is arbitrary and ultimately evil in condemning the hypothetical children of Sodom to death together with their elders, and in punishing the Israelites for worshiping the Golden Calf.

The narrator sees the binding of Isaac as a demand for blind obedience, and the destruction of the Tower of Babel as punishment for acting on free will. This Cain freely admits that he would like to kill God, and with each episode he builds his argument that God is capricious, uncaring, and unjust. He meets Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah, observes the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, enters the employ of Job, and sails on Noah’s Ark. José Saramago’s final work of fiction gives vent to his lifelong atheism in a sustained rant against the God of the Hebrew Bible. Cain, condemned by God in the Book of Genesis to wander the earth, speaks for the author, roaming surrealistically through time as well as space to witness Biblical events at first hand.

Cain by josé saramago