Reading 1001 discussion

So, I really wish Saramago would just use normal dialogue punctuation and convention. I can’t see that his style gains much from the way he does it and it’s mildly confusing - not enough to actually cause difficulty but enough to be annoying.

That said, I enjoyed this far more than my recollection of reading The Cave suggested I would. It was really humorous and it’s a perspective I already agree with. Maybe it didn’t add anything new to the critiques of Christianity or religion in general, but the story was fun.

I read this in 2014, my review -- at first it was hard to take because it seemed so sacrilegious. But by the end I thought it was pretty descriptive of man. We are always arguing with God and seeing ourselves as more righteous and more God than God. This book may actually provoke some to read the Bible and yes, I think it is pretty hard for us to understand the God of the Old Testament. This may not be his best book and I wonder if it was a bad place to start with Saramago. One thing that I really liked was Saramago mentions that Adam almost lived to the time of Noah. I had only recently come to realize that when I was reading Genesis at the first of this year. Saramago knows his Bible as he would need to do to write this satire.

Pre-2016 review:

*** 1/2

Cain, having killed Abel his brother and being banished by god to err between past and future biblical events, is pissed off at god and tries to exact some revenge. A rather iconoclastic and light-hearted view of some questions major religions had (and still have) about the nature of god as told in the old testament and the Talmud. A short, quick, enjoyable read. There are two stylistic aspects whose purpose is still a bit of a mystery to me. The first is the absence of any capital letters to refer to any of the characters (including god) and the places in the novel. The second is lack of structure or delimiters/paragraphs when relating the various dialogues in the novel. These choices were deliberate and most likely served a narrative purpose, but which one?