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Cain
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Author
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Jose Saramago. Margareet Jull Costa, trans.
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Publisher
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Mariner
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Format
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paperback
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ISBN
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9780547840178
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Pages/Publication Date
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159/2012
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Daedalus Item Code
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29465
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This item is not available.
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Description
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In this last novel by the late Nobel Prize winner, José Saramago daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Old Testament, recalling his provocative The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. His tale runs from the Garden of Eden, when God realizes he has forgotten to give Adam and Eve the gift of speech, to the moment when Noah's Ark lands on the dry peak of Ararat. And it is Cain, the despised, the murderer, who is Saramago's protagonist. Condemned to wander forever after he kills his brother Abel, Cain makes his way through the world in the company of a personable donkey. He is a witness to the stories of Isaac and Abraham, the destruction of the Tower of Babel, Moses and the golden calf, and the trials of Job. The rapacious Queen Lilith takes him as her lover, and an old man with two sheep on a rope crosses his path. And again and again, Cain encounters a God whose actions seem callous, cruel, and unjust, and argues with Him. "And one thing we know for certain," Saramago writes, "is that they continued to argue and are arguing still." "A winkingly blasphemous retelling of the Old Testament.... Saramago, playfully stretching his chatty late style, pokes holes in the stated logic of the biblical God throughout the novel."—The New Yorker "Saramago transforms familiar stories boldly, but with an intricate respect for their power and for the mysterious power of storytelling itself. Far from merely inverting the biblical tales or turning them inside out, he folds and refolds them in a prismatic, shadowy light."—NYTBR "Saramago juxtaposes an eminently readable narrative of work and poverty, class and desire, knowledge and timelessness—one in which God, too, as he faces Cain in the wake of Noah's Ark, emerges as far more human than expected."—SFChronicle
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