The Myth of Cain Rewritten by Jose Saramago: A Lost Opportunity? - Review of José Saramago, "Caim"
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ABSTRACT:
José Saramago, Caim: Lisbon: Caminho, 2009 (novel in Portuguese; English translation not yet available) – 182 pages, soft covers, ISBN 978-972-212-076-0
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EXTRACT
This review offers some brief lines of thought on Caim (Cain), the last in a long line of novels by the Portuguese writer and 1998 Nobel laureate José Saramago (1922-2010). This novel does not yet exist in English, but will no doubt soon join virtually all its predecessors in that language: it has already proved a best-seller in Portugal and Spain.
José Saramago was a national icon in Portugal, where his death in June 2010 was commemorated with two days’ national mourning, and was equally revered in neighbouring Spain, his adopted country of residence (in later years he lived in the Canary Islands). He also had a tremendous following in Latin America, Italy, France and elsewhere, being seen as an ambassador for Portuguese culture and the Portuguese language and respected as much for the outstanding merits of his literary works (mostly novels) as for his outspoken and often controversial political statements. In India, works of Saramago’s have appeared in Hindi and Bengali translation.
Saramago’s work has also made considerable inroads into the English-speaking world, notably with the apocalyptic novel Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness, 1995), also made into a successful film. The novelist, famously an unreconstructed communist and convinced atheist, was never a stranger to controversy, and indeed, with Caim might seem even to have gone out to court it. This novel totally reverses the relaxed mood that had been created by its immediate predecessor, the genial comedy A Viagem do Elefante (The Elephant’s Journey, 2008): it is one of its author’s blackest works, perhaps only to be compared with the totalitarian nightmare Ensaio sobre a Lucidez (Seeing, 2004) in its harshness.
Saramago returns to the critique of the Judeo-Christian belief-system that he had began in the notably controversial O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1991), a sardonic rewriting of the Christian Gospels which drew the highest of praise from America’s notably demanding critic Harold Bloom (a long-term Saramago admirer who has, indeed repeatedly named him the greatest novelist of recent times). In Caim, Saramago does for the Judeo-Christian Old Testament what he did in the earlier novel for the New Testament Gospels, revisiting biblical narratives with the unforgiving eye of an atheist. The ideological project is crystal-clear. Its aesthetic success and conceptual coherence are for the reader to decide (...)
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NB: The journal's dates are in fact July 2010 - January 2011. A Portuguese-language version of this review also exists (see separate getcited entry).
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