7/4/2023 0 Comments Cain josé saramago![]() ![]() (Talk about setting someone up for failure.) Adam and Eve are tossed from the Garden of Eden, finding their way to a cave, and there they beget Cain and Abel. In the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner (and communist and atheist) Saramago’s case, the story opens as it does in the Bible: with Genesis, that is, in which God is an impatient, violent and impulsive chap who isn’t quite sure why the humans he created have turned out so bad, but is swift to punish them savagely for living up to their natures. ![]() Indeed: The best modern (if not modernist) writers-Mann, Kafka, Bellow, the list goes on-have always made fruitful use of the Bible, and particularly in subversive readings of it that match the collapse of faith in Western civilization’s post-Nietzschean twilight. ![]() Why would a dedicated communist and atheist turn to the Bible as the theme for his final novel? Because the Bible is literature, and literature in a way that the best writers have long recognized-and the late Saramago ( Small Memories, 2011, etc.) is one of the best. ![]()
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