Taken from the site "Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, http://www.feltrinellieditore.it/SchedaLibro?id_volume=5001423
" Human history is the story of their misunderstandings with God, neither he understands us, nor we understand him. "Saramago The Old Testament, where Cain, the biblical personification of evil, is a man neither better nor worse than others in the presence of an evil god , unjust and envious, that really knows what he wants and especially does not like men. Twenty years after
Gospel According to Jesus Christ , José Saramago returns to explicitly deal with religion a test for impeccable style and narrative irony. If in the past, the Portuguese Nobel prize had given us his version of the New Testament, now engages with the Old. To do so, choose a character and more negative, the biblical personification of evil, he who kills his brother Cain. Reversing the traditional perspective, Saramago makes a human being neither better nor worse than others. On the contrary, the god who is out of the narrative is an evil god, unjust and envious, that really knows what he wants and especially does not like men. He is a god who refuses, apparently only on a whim and indifference, Cain's offering, resulting in the murder of Abel.
Cacciato and sentenced to a wandering life, the destiny of Cain is that of a traveling PICARO riding a mule through space and time, in a wasteland at the dawn of humanity. Now the protagonist, now as a spectator, this cute little adventurer a 'villain through all the most important episodes of the biblical narrative: the expulsion from Eden, adventures with the insatiable Lilith, the sacrifice of Isaac, the construction of the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom, the episode of the golden calf, the tests imposed upon poor Job, and finally the story Noah's Ark (the end of which, with a master stroke, the author changes the course of human history).
personal and ironic rewriting of the Bible, Cain is an outstanding literary invention and a powerful allegory that depicts the absurdity of a god who is more cruel than the worst of men. The major work of a writer at the height of his maturity, perhaps never so clear, lucid and lively.
Biography of José Saramago José http://www.feltrinellieditore.it/SchedaAutore?id_autore=253847
Saramago was born in 1922 in Azinhaga, Portugal. Two years after his birth, the family of the writer, he moved to Lisbon, where his father worked as a policeman. The economic difficulties that the family pays, forcing him to abandon his studies and to take different jobs. Make it the blacksmith, the designer, proofreader, translator, journalist, and literary editor and production in a publishing house.
In 1947 he published his first novel, Land of sin receiving a lukewarm reception. These were the dark years of the dictatorship of Salazar: Saramago is constantly subjected to the censure of the regime on his journalistic writings and is kept under control by Pide, the political police salazariana, who always manages to escape, even when - in 1959 - he joined the Portuguese Communist Party, then illegal.
In the sixties the business of journalism Saramago and directed towards literary criticism, and in 1966 he published his first collection of poems, Poems possible. This was followed, in 1970 the collection probably cheer and chronicles of this world and the other 1971, The baggage of the traveler and the 1973 Opinions that DL had 1974.
In 1974, the year of the "Carnation Revolution" - the military coup that marked the end of the fascist regime in Portugal - opens a new phase in Saramago's literary novel that takes shape in the 1977 Manual of Painting and Calligraphy , while the following year a public land called Alentejo. Also during this period he wrote for the theater (The night , 1979 and What do I do with this book? ) an activity that will continue in subsequent years ( Second Life of Francis of Assisi , 1987; In Appointments , 1993 and Don Giovanni, or the dissolute acquitted in 2005). In 1982 he published
Memorial convent (published in Italy by Feltrinelli in 1984), the novel gives him notoriety worldwide. following year the death of Ricardo Reis (1984, Feltrinelli 1985), The Stone Raft (1986), History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989). In the nineties, leaving The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991),
Blindness (1995) and All names (1997). The first decade of 2000 is the most prolific writer of Saramago, which he published seven novels: The cave (2001), duplicate Man (2002), An Essay on the lucidity (2004 ) Intermittences death (2005), Small memory (2006), The Journey Elephant (2008) and Cain (2009, ed. Com. Feltrinelli 2010).
In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, a recognition that aroused much controversy in the Catholic world for its well-known anti-religious positions. Controversy that they did decide to move to Lanzarote, Canary Islands.
And 'who died in June 2010.
0 comments:
Post a Comment