Desire is the feeling which urges us to go to something and loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something: and that art is improper which aims at exciting these feelings in us...
James Joyce, Paris Notebook
Quant à la souffrance morale, elle est au moins aussi souvent amenée par notre faute, et de toute manière elle ne serait pas aussi aiguë si nous n'avions surexcité notre sensibilité au point de la rendre morbide.
Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion
- its supposed atheism is the most shallow: the indictment the book displays against the God of the Old Testament could be directed against any pagan god of the Iliad or of the Odyssey—all these gods and all these books are equally violent (and what about Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe?); true literature, even when it is frankly irreligious, shows rather wonder or concern about the conundrum at issue here, which besieges many different kinds of culture; in the whole book, there is perhaps only one single sentence able to keep things in perspective: "The history of men is the history of their misunderstandings with god; neither he understands us, neither we understand him" (end of chapter 6);
- after Kierkegaard, no sensible writer would have written such a narrow paraphrase of Isaac's sacrifice; this is not a matter of erudition, but sensibility;
- people who speak up for the book say it is humorous; true humour, however, is never resentful; the humour one finds in Caim is, besides resentful, coarse: in the last chapters, the sexual vulgarity is indeed worthy of TV sitcoms like the Brazilian Zorra Total; the problem is that the approach doesn't work well in writing; on the other hand, one wonders why in the description of Caim's orgy with Lilith's female slaves—chapter 4, which is relatively well-written—any decent writer would use so artificial terms such as "penis" and "órgão" (or for that matter, in the end of chapter 10: "e quando Caim se encontrou sobre lilith e se preparava par a penetrar..."); this seems an immaculate residue of some kind of Iberian female beatería, directed towards Mary's diametrically opposite material semblance (if not towards Mary herself);
- the mockery is flashy; this passage, for instance, is as crudely written as it is plainly anti-Semitic: "Como sempre tem sucedido, à mínima derrota os judeus perdem a vontade de lutar, e, embora na actualidade já não se usem manifestações de desânimo como as que eram praticadas no tempo de josué, quando rasgavam as roupas que tinham vestidas e se lançavam ao chão, com o rosto na terra e as cabeças cobertas de pó, a choradeira verbal é inevitável" (chapter 9);
- there are cheesy clichés which simply doesn't work: "No cimo da escada estava lilith, tão bela, tão voluptuosa como antes.." (chapter 10); Job's house referred as "casona" (chapter 11); "cadáver ainda quente de Abel" (chapter 11); moreover, the intelligent reader will stumble accross an expression like "preceitos burgueses" (applied to Lilith's habits) in the end of chapter 11—the intended sarcasm completely fails, because the expression comes too quickly and is completely out of context (even if the book as a whole narrates an ancient story with modern overtones);
- there are other small problems which seems unworthy of accomplished writers, such as ambiguity or awkwardness in the handling of pronouns: "sua própria testa" (chapter 4, p. 44 in the Companhia das Letras' edition);
- the whole idea of "outros presentes," with which Caim is made to travel like a shuttlecock from one classical episode of the Old Testament to another (in order just to cheaply deride the moral of the stories), is amateurish sleight of hand; the only justification for this childish trick is Caim's characterization as someone errante e perdido—a "wandering soul" (but this characterization comes from the Old Testament itself, and the book as a whole doesn't take it seriously);
- there are unjustifiable redundancies in the narrative: "Lilith tinha perguntado, Por que vieste, mas ele já havia declarado antes que não sabia como chegara ali, por isso ela modificou a interrogação, Que andaste a fazer durante todos estes anos..." (Capter 10);
- there is at least one shameless borrowing from the Communist Gospels: "... este patrão e este empregado nem tinham chegado a conhecer-se, é o mau que tem a divisão em classes, cada um no seu lugar, se possível onde nasceu, assim não haverá nenhuma maneira de fazer amizades entre oriundos dos diversos mundos";
- why any decent writer would leave in a book a good-for-nothing character such as the old man with "duas ovelhas atadas por um baraço" with whom Caim crosses many times along the story?!
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