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    I Am God: A Novel
    I Am God: A Novel
    I Am God: A Novel
    Ebook204 pages4 hours

    I Am God: A Novel

    By Giacomo Sartori and Frederika Randall

    3/5

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    Diabolically funny and subversively philosophical, Italian novelist Giacomo Sartori’s I am God is the diary of the Almighty’s existential crisis that ensues when he falls in love with a human.

    I am God. Have been forever, will be forever. Forever, mind you, with the razor-sharp glint of a diamond, and without any counterpart in the languages of men. So begins God’s diary of the existential crisis that ensues when, inexplicably, he falls in love with a human. And not just any human, but a geneticist and fanatical atheist who’s certain she can improve upon the magnificent creation she doesn’t even give him the credit for. It’s frustrating, for a god.

    God has infinitely bigger things to occupy his celestial attentions. Yet he can’t tear his eyes (so to speak) from the geneticist who’s unsettlingly avid when it comes to science, sex, and Sicilian cannoli. Whatever happens, he must safeguard his transcendental dignity. So he watches—disinterestedly, of course—as the handsome climatologist who has his sights set on her keeps having strange accidents. And as the lanky geneticist becomes hell-bent on infiltrating the Vatican’s secret files, for reasons of her own….

    A sly critique of the hypocrisy and hubris that underlie faith in religion, science, and macho careerism, I Am God takes us on a hilarious and provocative romp through the Big Questions with the universe’s supreme storyteller.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRestless Books
    Release dateFeb 5, 2019
    ISBN9781632062154
    Author

    Giacomo Sartori

    The novelist, poet and dramatist Giacomo Sartori was born in 1958 in Trento in the Alpine northeast of Italy near the Austrian border. He lives in Paris. An agronomist, he is a soil specialist whose unusual day job (unusual for a writer) has shaped a distinctive concrete and poetic literary style. A prolific and sophisticated writer of fiction with a dozen volumes to his credit, Sartori took as his subject in his early novels Tritolo (TNT) and Sacrificio (Sacrifice) the stifling provincial atmosphere of the valleys of his native region and the twisted lives of its most vulnerable inhabitants. A recent novel Rogo (At the Stake), also set in the region, is written in the voices of three women from different historical periods who commit infanticide. The autofiction Anatomia della battaglia (The Anatomy of the Battle) about a young man’s effort to come to terms with and define his manhood against the model of his father, a committed Fascist, and the historical novel Cielo nero (Black Heavens), deal with fascism and its dark, persistent allure. Sartori’s shorter fiction includes the book of interrelated absurdist stories Autismi (Autisms, 2018) written in the voice of a person struggling to cope with the bizarre, baffling customs and expectations that all around him seem to share. The black humor and pessimism are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. Sartori has also published poems and plays, and he has won several Italian literary prizes. Three of his novels have been translated into French. Several stories from Autismi appeared in Frederika Randall’s English translation in Massachusetts Review last year. An excerpt from L’Anatomia della battaglia, also translated by Randall, appeared in The Arkansas International no 2.

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    Reviews for I Am God

    3/5

    15 ratings3 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Some people might find this short novel fun, I found it boring and sophomoric.
    • 3/5
      It's a clever idea that falls too short at every turn: God becomes infatuated with a human female. Unfortunately, this "all powerful" god is "all too human," as well as too Catholic, too anthropomorphic, and just not very interesting. There are a couple clever and interesting chapters. The last chapter, except for the last paragraph (which an editor should have excised), is an interesting comment on how the human species has corrupted and defiled Earth, but it has little to do with the rest of the novella. But, like I noted, it is a clever idea and I kept reading and wishing for more; in the end, it didn't work for me.
    • 3/5
      Being a novella in which the Almighty vents at length about the difficulties he has faced and overcome in the process of building and keeping the necessary close watch over everything happening in innumerable galaxies. When this account sticks to droll observations about omnipresence and omnipotence, it's quite good, and, toward the end, when the plot, such as it is, veers over into what the reviewers told me the whole book was about, viz., his crush on an earthling female, it's also very humorous and interesting. Alas and alack, said plot twist comes about 150 pages too late; in the bulk of the book, the plot is skeletal, confusing, and very undercooked, as our divine narrator contents himself with minute observations on a series of awkward courtships and the minutiae of sitcomish workplaces, interspersed with misanthropic socio-political rants.

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    I Am God - Giacomo Sartori

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