The novel “Cain” (2009) is Jose Saramago’s last book—the great Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, who passed away in 2010.
In his work, Saramago—on the one hand, a convinced Marxist and a member of the Communist Party; on the other, an incomparable philosopher of the modern world—tackled questions of religion and, one might say, rewrote the Bible. His “Gospel of Jesus” proposed an unfamiliar view of a plot known to humanity for the third millennium already, and it destroys the dogma of the Holy Trinity. Revolutionary “Cain” begins with the way God makes the hero the “agreement on dividing responsibility for Abel’s death”…