When we meet Niko, as he’s known to friends and family, he is struggling with a never-ending and always growing pit and ache in his stomach. Although Niko’s mother became a Danish national treasure as a pop singer, she and Niko’s father die in a car accident when Niko is 13. He was cared for by his older sister, who also manages and invests the earnings from their mother’s songs. But Niko’s fear of losing her increases as she begins living her own life, gets married and has a family. Niko increases his carousing and fighting, gaining the reputation of “an up-and-coming young psychopath.” His path of self-destruction includes suicide attempts, trying to erase that knotting pain in his stomach.

Niko believes things may finally be changing for the better when he meets Silje, who turns out to be the singer in a tribute band to Niko’s mother. Niko falls deeply in love with her but can’t control the demons inside. During a minor argument he ends up savagely beating Silje and then attempts suicide in his sister’s home. His actions eventually drive his sister to suicide herself, an event that crushes him.

The knot is tearing down everything to make room for itself. Walls, rooftops, floors, everything is being smashed to pieces in the loudest possible way. Suddenly the noise and pain stop, because what’s the point of giving me a stomach ache when I no longer function? All is silent, the demolition is over, the knot is everywhere and I am no longer me. I am the knot.

It’s at this point that Jesus Christ steps in. Actually, he breaks in. Niko wakes up early one morning to the sounds of a prowler in his apartment. Niko sees a man who’s “tough, long-haired, bearded and big and strong, and [who] oozes confidence” entering his bathroom. When the man comes out, Niko clocks him in the head with an ashtray. Niko meet Jesus, or at least someone who claims to be Jesus and there to make Niko “a better man.”

This encounter reflects part of the tone of My Friend Jesus Christ. Husum takes a light, at times humorous, touch to the issues Niko faces. At the same time, the sparse language of the work, translated from the Danish by Mette Petersen, retains a balance of seriousness and sincerity. That quality may reflect Husum’s time as a screenwriter prior to the book, first published in Denmark in 2008 as “My Friendship with Jesus Christ” and now in its first English translation.

Although Niko is relatively convinced that Jesus is a “nutter,” when Jesus touches him the knot disappears. Jesus advises Niko to move from Copenhagen to Tarm, the village in Jutland where his parents grew up. Niko’s mother never returned to the town and refused offers to perform there after running away with Niko’s father to escape her own abusive father. Figuring he has little or nothing left to lose, Niko moves there.

Once in Tarm, Niko quickly comes to treasure the area and makes a handful of friends and acquaintances, including a friend from his childhood who shows up in town, a promiscuous hairdresser, and an attractive Jehovah’s Witness who comes to Niko’s door. Acting again on the advice of Jesus (or the “nutter”), Niko convinces his friends, a group he calls “NATO,” to return with him to Copenhagen to help him try and right the wrongs he’s done. With a variety of twists, turns and complications, the group devotes itself to that mission with Niko getting occasional advice — and even some assistance in a fight — from Jesus.

My Friend Jesus Christ is about a search for individual redemption, not Christian fiction or even markedly religious. In fact, some Christians might even object to the book’s portrayal of Jesus. Like Niko, the reader gets hints that the evidence supports the man’s claims that he is Jesus but we are never actually sure.

Husum seems at his best in describing Niko before he meets Jesus, doing a first-rate job of portraying a soul in agony. That effort, though, makes some of the balance of the book seem a bit of a misfire. Niko’s easy acceptance of the idea of moving to Tarm and his mollification there and later don’t quite fit the self-destructive and tormented Niko of the first third of the book. Likewise, at times events in Copenhagen seem a bit too much like a blithe excursion than the struggle of an anguished soul. Additionally, although the ending is certainly appropriate for a story about a search for redemption, it is a bit confusing.

Despite those flaws, My Friend Jesus Christ entertains in its own idiosyncratic way.

Lars Husum, My Friend Jesus Christ

Cain is an assiduous indictment of the God of the Old Testament by re-imagining the brief tale the Bible tells of the title character. Saramago, who died last year, made his position clear on the book’s release in Europe in 2009. He said the Bible depicts a “cruel, spiteful, vengeful, jealous and unbearable God” and recommending people not trust that God. The book is Saramago’s extended literary argument on that point, frequently from Cain’s mouth.

Saramago’s story of Cain killing his brother Abel is just the starting point. God’s judgment after Abel’s death is for Cain to be “a restless wanderer.” In Saramago’s hands, he wanders the Book of Genesis, aided by the fact he can go back and forth in time. Cain visits the Tower of Babel, is present as Abraham prepares to sacrifice Isaac and joins Noah on the ark, but not in the chronological order in which these events appear in the Bible.

Throughout, it is clear that Cain is increasingly angered by what he perceives as God’s capriciousness and antipathy toward his creation, that he is an entity “who devours his own children.” In Saramago’s version of events, the devil and other fallen angels rebelled because God is evil. God “is not a person to be trusted” and the ease with which he orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac indicates such acts are “a deep-seated habit.” If anything, if God has a conscience, it is “so flexible” that it agrees with whatever God does, regardless of effect or ramifications. Cain even lays Abel’s murder at God’s feet, saying, “[Y]ou were the one who pronounced sentence, whereas I merely carried out the execution.” He believes “god should not go wasting his energies on creating an atmosphere of constant terror and fear,” particularly when he turns his back on the poor, unfortunate and wretched.

Cain is unquestionably tendentious. It is also a more blunt approach to a subject Saramago addressed in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, an irreverent re-imagination of Christ’s life in which Saramago also displayed some anger. Yet Saramago’s style keeps the book from straying completely into the category of screed. Although it sounds the same notes several times, Cain‘s indictment often reflects a touch of humor. For example, when Abraham suggests Isaac forget that he was willing to kill his son, Isaac responds, “I’m not sure that I can.” Likewise, as Cain ponders Abraham was about to do, he wonders if God would order his own son to be killed if he had one.

The book, being released in the U.S. in a translation by Margaret Jull Costa, who has been translating Saramago’s works for more than a decade, continues some of Saramago’s prior style idiosyncrasies. None of the proper names in the book are capitalized unless they begin a sentence or line of dialogue. This is not so much a tool of disrespect toward “god” as a necessity of style. Like many of his works, the novel contains long passages built not of sentences but long clauses separated only by commas. Especially since conversations are not delineated by quotation marks, it is only the capitalization of a word amidst one of these clauses that indicates the speaker has changed. What might appear as run-on sentences comes off almost as stream-of-consciousness conversation, although in Saramago’s and Costa’s hands the conversations have an almost colloquial feel. It does, though, take a bit of getting use to, especially for those who haven’t previously read much Saramago.

Cain isn’t plowing any new ground. Critics have long pointed out the God of the Old Testament and Torah seems cruel and unjust. And some Christians classify some of the harshest positions in the Old Testament as metaphorical, not literal, although 3 in 10 Americans view the Bible as the literal word of God. Saramago fans may enjoy the book but it does not rank with works like Blindness, All The Names or Death with Interruptions. Whether relative newcomers to the Saramago oeuvre appreciate it may hinge as much on their religious viewpoints as anything.

José Saramago, Cain

Susanne “Sanna” Moder, the narrator of the slim novel, uses almost naive political impressions, the views of others and her memories in casting cast an indelible portrait of “ordinary” life at the time. In part a love story set in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1930s, even Senna’s simple, ingenue-like life is affected almost daily by Nazism and politics.

Keun’s book, written and first published in 1937 after she fled Germany, portrays Sanna as somewhat vacuous or at least generally ignorant of political details. To her, dresses, parties and love are the most important things in her life. When she hears speeches warning that those who impede the Nazi program will be smashed, her “heart stands still … because how do I know I’m not one of the sort who are going to be smashed?” But she is clever. Despite admitting she admits she doesn’t understand the nuances, she does know there are simply certain things you shouldn’t talk about or do. Yet her observations, often unintentionally sardonic, help reveal life and society under Nazism. For example, when someone says Hitler united the whole German nation, Sanna thinks that’s fine but “it’s just that the people making up the whole German nation don’t get on with each other.”

Personal relationships certainly aren’t exempt. Sanna and her girlfriend, Gerti, are interested in their love lives and the story’s ultimate resolution revolves in large part around Sanna and the man she loves. But Gerti is in love with the son of a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman. As a result, Sanna observes, he “is a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class — I can never get the hang of these labels.” Regardless of the label, Nazi race laws make the relationship illegal and the two risk their freedom by seeing each other.

Likewise, when Sanna recalls being summoned to a Gestapo office, it appears a “place of pilgrimage. Mothers are informing on their daughters-in-law, daughters on their fathers-in-law, brothers on their sisters, sisters on their brothers, friends on their friends, drinking companions on their drinking companions, neighbours on their neighbours.” There is also a less consistent stream of people looking for those who have “disappeared” but they “are not so well and kindly treated as the informers.”

Then there’s Sanna’s older stepbrother, Algin, a highly successful novelist — until his books were banned by the Nazis. Facing the fact that he will remain “undesirable” unless he writes a Nazi novel and even then be viewed with suspicion, he contemplates writing a long poem about Hitler. Yet as a journalist friend observes, the Nazis have made Germany “a perfect country, and a perfect country doesn’t need writers.”

With its descriptive yet sparse prose, After Midnight reveals the pervasive effect politics had on normal life in Nazi Germany. Sanna’s narration adds touches of innocence, satire and normalcy to a tale of people who, one way or another, have become outsiders in their own country. With the mix of people Sanna knows, her thoughts and their comments, the book provides a perspective on day to day life in pre-war Germany a work of nonfiction would find it difficult to capture.

Algin’s story seems to have a basis in Keun’s own life. She wrote bestselling novels but once the Nazis took power the books were withdrawn from circulation. Keun, in fact, even dared to seek damages from the Gestapo for lost profits after it seized unsold copies of the novels. While she fled the country in 1936, she published several novels in Amsterdam, including After Midnight. She then returned to Germany in 1940 under an assumed name and lived there until the end of the war.

After Midnight made its first U.S. appearance in 1938. This translation, by Althea Bell, was published in the U.K. in 1985 but is now the first release in Melville House’s Neversink Library, a series of “books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored.” In addition to being an excellent work, After Midnight is a superb start to that series.

Imgard Keun, After Midnight

Tabucchi addresses some serious issues, including the age-old question of whether we should be governed by reason or emotion and where our obligations lie in an authoritarian society. Yet Tabucchi’s title character, Dr. Pereira, is like most people, an ordinary person living an ordinary life. A respected crime reporter for 30 years who now edits the cultural page of a second-rate Lisbon newspaper, Pereira still mourns the death of his wife and struggles to follow the recommendations of his physician regarding his obesity and diet. These normal signposts in an individual’s life combine with life under the Estada Novo (“New State”), a conservative, nationalistic, pro-Catholic authoritarian regime, to cause the humble Pereira to face these issues.

What really drives Pereira Maintains. though, is a narrative device that gives rise to the title. An unknown third person narrates the story and, from the opening sentence, consistently uses the phrase “Pereira maintains” to relay what Pereira said. The phrase is used for both the significant and the mundane. Thus, the first chapter opens with “Pereira maintains he met him one summer’s day.” In contrast, the second chapter begins, “In the afternoon the weather changed, Pereira maintains.” The repeated usage of a phrase one would expect to see in a report on an interrogation or a formal inquiry combines with the fact we do not know who is reporting this contributes to and helps build an underlying sense of dread and disquiet. (Interestingly, when the book was first published in the U.S. in 1996 it carried the title Pereira Declares: A Testimony and it used “declares” instead of “maintains,” although it and this new hardcover release by a different publisher, Edinburgh-based Canongate Books, both use a translation by Patrick Creagh.)

The story is built around Pereira’s relationship with Monteiro Rossi, a recently a philosophy student, and Rossi’s girlfriend, Marta. Pereira, who talks to his wife’s picture every day, reads an excerpt from a dissertation Rossi wrote on death. He locates Rossi and invites him to write advance obituaries of living writers for the newspaper so they are available when the writer dies. Despite the fact none is worthy of publishing, Pereira seems drawn to Rossi and Marta, almost as if they were the children he and his wife never had. He continues to pay Rossi and invite him to write more. His growing relationship with Rossi and Marta and exposure to their left-wing ideas lead Pereira to examine if and how his life is changing and to become more cognizant of what he sees daily in the society in which he lives.

Since it was first published in Italy in 1994, Pereira Maintains has been seen as a commentary on Italy under Silvio Berlusconi, first named prime minister that year. In fact, Tabucchi himself has recognized that the book, which won three prestigious Italian literary awards, is seen by Berlusconi opponents as “a symbol of resistance from within.” This is another area in which the book succeeds. Here is a book set in 1930s Portugal when fascism was predominant in Europe and the Spanish Civil War was raging yet is viewed as speaking to issues decades later. In fact, as allegory, Pereira Maintains will undoubtedly remain relevant, which perhaps suggests why it is reappearing in hardcover.

Equally impressive is Tabucchi’s crisp and concise writing. Even though Pereira also ponders the Catholic ideas of the soul and resurrection and the role of literature in society, Pereira Maintains is less than 200 pages. Few books can remain quite so readable while exploring — and allowing the reader to explore — such a variety of issues as they confront a near everyman. To say that Pereira Maintains excels at more than one thing is a serious understatement. In fact, it surpasses almost any test of first-class literature.

Antonia Tabucchi , Pereira Maintains