Creation

When José Saramago denounced the Bible as a ‘catalogue of cruelties’ at the launch of his novel Cain in 2009, the response from the Catholic church in Portugal was fast and frosty. The country’s conference of bishops labelled his comments ‘offensive’, adding: ‘Insults do no one any good, particularly from a Nobel prizewinner.’ Saramago might have been taking his cue from the man he considered to be Portugal’s greatest novelist. While serving as a diplomat in Britain, Cuba and France, Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) savaged clerical hypocrisy and national backwardness in what are now considered canonical realist doorstoppers. And a century before Saramago, he caused a similar ruckus with Adam

Readers familiar with Sheila Heti’s work, most notably How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, in which she examines both the possibility and implications of choosing one’s life and dealing with the consequences, will be familiar with her apparent capriciousness. Her prose — freewheeling, elliptical, a tangle of jokiness and jeopardy — seems to capture the puzzle of proportionality: how seriously should we take this one life we have, and how can we hope to balance our opposing urges towards levity and gravity? In Pure Colour, we appear to be in similar territory, immediately introduced to a playful version of the universe in which humans are the critics of God’s