Cain

The last novel to be written before the death of the great Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, who passed away in June 2010 - a controversial book in the mode of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Two decades after Portuguese novelist and Nobel Laureate José Saramago shocked the religious world with his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, he has done it again with Cain, a satire of the Old Testament. Written in the last years of Saramago’s life, it tackles many of the moral and logical non sequiturs created by a wilful, authoritarian God, and forms part of Saramago’s long argument with religion.

The stories in this book are witty and provocative. After Adam and Eve have been cast out of Eden, Eve decides to go back and ask the angel guarding the gate if he can give her some of the fruit that is going to waste inside. The angel agrees, and although Eve swears to Adam that she offered the angel nothing in return, their first child is suspiciously blond and fair-skinned. Cain, in his wandering, overhears a strange conversation between a man named Abraham and his son Isaac – and manages to prevent the father from murdering the son. The angel appointed by God to prevent the murder arrives late due to a wing malfunction. Cain brushes off his apology. ‘What would have happened if I hadn’t been here?’ Cain asks, ‘and what kind of god would ask a father to sacrifice his own son?’ About the Author

Jose Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922 and has been a full-time writer since 1979. His oeuvre embraces plays, poetry, short stories, non-fiction and ten novels, which have been translated into more than forty languages and have established him as the most influential Portuguese writer of his generation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.