Cain by José Saramago

José Saramago won the Nobel Prize in 1998. He died in 2010, and Cain is his last novel. While it takes a bit of effort to get used to his style, his books are a lot of fun and well-worth the effort. In The Stone Raft, a geologist discovers a fissure in the Pyrenees Mountains. He returns for further investigation to find the gap has widened. Eventually, Spain and Portugal break off from Europe and float out into the Atlantic Ocean, narrowly missing the Canary Islands. Blindness is a retelling of Camus’ novel, The Plague, and All the Names involves a clerk in a registry office who becomes obsessed with a card accidentally removed from a drawer.

Cain recounts the story following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and the murder of Abel. Marked by the Lord and condemned to wander the earth, Cain slingshots from various places and time periods to witness events in the Old Testament. He sees Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son, Isaac; he sees the remains of the Tower of Babel; he hitches a ride on Noah’s Ark; he spends some time working for Job, until his fortunes take a downturn; Cain spends some time with Joshua before the trumpets blare; and he is present when Moses comes down from the mountain. In all of these encounters, Cain questions the actions and motives of God.

At the conclusion of the novel, when Noah tries to complete the Ark on time and in budget, God sends an army of angels to assist with the construction. Cain engages them in a conversation about the Lord. The following two passages are reproduced exactly as printed to give an idea of Saramago’s style. Cain establishes a friendly bond with some of the angels, who claim, “happiness on earth was far superior to that in heaven, but the lord, of course, being a jealous god, must never know this, because if he did, such seditious thoughts would merit the severest of reprisals with no regard for the perpetrators’ angelic status” (144). He likes long sentences and he is stingy about paragraphing and capitalization.

Cain replies, “if they really thought that, once this humanity had been destroyed, the race that followed would not fall into the same errors, the same temptations, the same follies and crimes, and they answered, We are mere angels, we know little about the incomprehensible charade that you call human nature, but to be perfectly frank, we don’t see how the second experiment will be any more satisfactory than the first, which ended in the long string of miseries we see before us now, in short, in our honest opinion as angels, and considering all the evidence, we don’t believe that human beings deserve life” (144-45).

 The dust jacket quotes John Updike on the author. “Saramago is a writer, like Faulkner, so confident of his resources and ultimate destination that he can bring any improbability to life.” I am in complete agreement. José Saramago’s Cain is a fun, thought-provoking, and interesting rational look at some of the best-loved stories of the Old Testament – a great place to begin exploring this amazing author. Five stars.
--Chiron, 4/10/13

The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago

José Saramago, the Portuguese author, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. He died last year. I have read about a half-dozen of Saramago’s works, and each time I start another of his novels, it takes a bit of getting use to his style.

The Elephant’s Journey is exactly that. Saramago based his novel on an historical event that occurred in the 16th century. King João III of Portugal has decided to present his cousin, Archduke Maximilian of Vienna, an elephant, Solomon, as a wedding present. The mahout, Subhro, who cares for the beast in a broken down corner of the king’s zoo, guides the elephant and a troop of workers and soldiers, on a trek across Europe during the Reformation and amid various conflicts.

Saramago’s prose contains long, convoluted sentences that sometimes repeat facts, or predict future events, or even fill in background information. They remind me of the “digressions” found in Beowulf, the great epic of the Anglo-Saxons written near the end of the 10th century c.e. Furthermore, he embeds dialogue in his sentences with little to no punctuation. Only a capital letter alerts the reader another person is speaking.

Here is an example:

“If I [Subhro] get to Vienna, I won’t be coming back. Won’t you go home to india, asked the commanding officer, No, I’m not an Indian anymore, And yet you obviously know a lot about hinduism, More or less, sir, more or less. Why do you say that, Because it’s all words and only words, and beyond the words there’s nothing, Is ganesh a word, asked the commanding officer, Yes, a word. like all the others, can only be explained by more words, but since the words we use to explain things, successfully or not, will in turn, have to be explained, our conversation will lead nowhere, the mistaken and the true will alternate, like some kind of curse, and we’ll never know what’s right and what’s wrong” (52).



He also sprinkles gems of wisdom throughout his story. Here is a favorite of mine:

“The past is an immense are of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a road, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath” (21). Sounds like an allegory of politicians and pundits who like to ignore the inconvenient aspects of history for their own purposes.

Saramago also has his moments of dry humor. The caravan halts near a village for rest, and some of the town’s people come out to see what’s what. They misunderstand some of the conversations about hinduism, and they rush to the local priest to tell him “God is an elephant” (57). The priest decides this is a demon from hell, and he orders the entire village to follow him to the caravan :

“The priest dipped the aspergillum in the water, took three steps forward and sprinkled the elephant’s head with it, at the same time murmuring words that sounded like latin, although no one understood them, not even the tiny educated minority present, namely the commanding officer, who had spent some years in a seminary, the result of a mystical crisis that eventually cured itself” (62-63).

Saramago’s novels really are great fun to read. The Stone Raft has the Iberian Peninsula breaking off from Europe and floating out into the Atlantic. In All the Names, a clerk becomes obsessed with the life of a woman he accidentally discovers when he removes a seventh card from an index file, instead of his customary six. Blindness is Saramago’s reworking of Camus’ The Plague.

Reading Saramago requires a bit of effort, but the rewards are … elephantine!

--Chiron, 8/14/11

Death with Interruptions by José Saramago

Satire is the use of humor to promote improvement in an individual, the government, or an institution. I have always considered Saramago’s novels to be satiric, but with a subtle streak of fun. Death with Interruptions is no exception, but the final chapters are really a hoot!

Saramago’s Blindness was a little like Camus’ The Plague, and Death is a little like Blindness in some respects. Like several of his novels, Death is set in an unnamed country, and this time the characters have no names, only titles: president, director, minister, cellist, king, and prime minister. Saramago uses long, complicated sentences with commas, periods, and an occasional apostrophe. He never uses question marks, exclamation points, or colons, semi or otherwise. The only letters capitalized are those following a period, those beginning a new statement in a conversation, and the letter I when death (not capitalized) refers to herself.

Here is an example of what I mean: “Death is sitting there, on a narrow crimson-upholstered chair, and starring fixedly at the first cellist, the one she watched while he was asleep and who wears striped pajamas, the one who owns a dog that is, at this moment, sleeping in the sun in the garden, waiting for his master to return. That is her man, a musician, nothing more, like the almost one hundred other men and women seated in a semicircle around their personal shaman, the conductor, and all of whom will, one day, in some future week or month or year, receive a violet-colored letter and leave the place empty, until some other violinist, flautist or trumpeter comes to sit in the same chair, perhaps with another shaman waving a baton to conjure forth sounds, life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface, and it is then that it occurs to death that she would be left with nothing to do if the sunken ship never managed to rise again, singing the evocative song sung by the waters as they cascade from her decks, like the watery song, dripping like a murmuring sigh over her undulating body, sung by the goddess amphitrite at her birth, when she becomes she who circles the seas, for that is the meaning of the name she was given” (188-89). Death has decided to send violet colored letters to individuals whom she has scheduled for death in seven days.

This excerpt constitutes two-thirds of a page of a five-page paragraph. Not exactly stream of consciousness, but it does require close attention to stay on Saramago’s wagon.

His dialogue is not broken into individual statements but is simply blended into the paragraph. Here follows a brief example of a conversation between the scythe and death, who has made a mistake and failed to deliver a letter to a man while he was forty-nine. The birthday has passed and he is still alive: “You can’t do that, said the scythe, It’s done, There’ll be consequences, Only one, What’s that, The death, at last, of that wretched cellist who’s been having a laugh at my expense. But the poor man doesn’t know he is supposed to be dead, As far as I’m concerned, he might as well know it, Even so, you don’t have the authority to change an index card, That’s where you’re wrong, I have all the power and authority I need, I’m death,” (184).

Saramago is always great fun. He also wrote The Stone Raft (Spain and Portugal float off into the Atlantic), and All the Names about a clerk in a government ministry in charge of vital statistics, who becomes obsessed with a stranger on a card stuck to one he was updating. Saramago won the Nobel Prize a few years back, and I highly recommend him for some fun, absorbing reading. 5 stars

--Chrion, 5/6/09