Review by New York Times Review
comic depictions of God are not, by nature, awe-inspiring, though some have been very fun. Hollywood has given us silly Gods, like George Burns in "Oh, God! " complaining about avocados - "I made the pit too big" - or Morgan Freeman in "Bruce Almighty" singing the jingle to "The Clapper." Literature has gone deeper and darker, with Stanley Elkin's Borschtbelt God in "The Living End" kvetching "I never found my audience," before wiping out the world. Somewhere in the middle of this silly-to-grim spectrum sits the narrator of the Italian writer Giacomo Sartori's new novel, "I Am God," who begins by announcing that, for the first time ever, He has started to think. "Up to now I've never thought, and I've never felt the need," He gripes, annoyed to be participating in such mundane activity. He is even keeping a diary - these pages before us - in which He rants with the gusto of someone who has kept His opinions to Himself for a very long time and finally has a chance to unload them. Much of the novel that follows is composed of His thoughts on everything from materialism and television to genetics and global warming. It's precisely the sort of thing we might hope for from God in a novel - that He would tell us what He really thinks! - but it does set a high bar for the novelist. Sartori's God is male, jokey and, in Frederika Randall's translation, fairly hokey, with a colloquial diction out of the 1950s and a propensity to wink and nudge. He calls human reason "cerebral yacketyyack," writes off human conversation as "balderdash" and blames the yacketyyack and the balderdash for "the whole shebang of infamy and atrocities." He points out His own puns ("I'd be in heaven once again, as they say") and overexplains Himself in footnotes ("I want to be sure this point is crystal clear"). He mocks the Catholic Church, but shares many of the church's more conservative views on subjects like gender ("Frailty, thy name is woman!") and sexuality ("Progress my backside: By now pornography and homosexuality flourish unchallenged!"). He's half heteronormative deity, half embarrassing uncle. He is also frustrated. For reasons He can't understand, He has fallen in love with a human woman, a "post-punk" atheist lab assistant named Daphne. (Greek mythological references are peppered throughout the book.) We quickly learn that His infatuation with this "lofty biker" and "lanky unbeliever" (she drives a motorcycle and steals and burns crucifixes as a hobby) is what has started Him thinking in the first place, and that many of His grumbly opinions about humanity are at least partly pretenses for avoiding His desirous thoughts about her. The novel's drama lies in Daphne's tale, which God gradually tells: the story of her own messy existence, and the mess she is making of His. Unfortunately, Daphne's story proves a little scattered, in part because she is kept at such a remove from the reader that she never emerges as a complex, coherent character, only as an object of God's fascination. Humor is famously tough to translate, and perhaps "I Am God" is a more successful book in Italian than in this English version. The premise is certainly fun. The problem is that God, here, isn't provocative or charismatic enough to pull off a oneman show. If God in a novel is going to offer insights, they should be more compelling than "When things are gained with difficulty, humans appreciate them more." If God in a novel cracks a joke, it can be silly or grim or anywhere in between, but it has to be funny. martin riker'S novel "Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return" was published last year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
"I myself am astonished at what's happening to me," God yes, that God confesses. "I'm the same . . . . I remain infallible, omniscient, omnipotent, omniwhatever. And yet, and yet . . . ." Somehow, God's fallen in love with "this damn Daphne"; she's "a tall girl with purple pigtails who at every opportunity is shoving her arms up a cow's ass," albeit with purpose, as she's a geneticist with a side gig in artificial bovine insemination. She's also "an incorrigible misbeliever who's in favor of gay marriage and abortion on demand . . . and all she cares about is her own sexual satisfaction." As a "militant atheist," she just might have a virtual target on the Vatican. Plagued by "foolishness," God's taken to journaling, making his ruinous obsession an open book in fact, this open book. Italian novelist, poet, dramatist, and scientist Sartori ruthlessly confronts the Catholic Church, hypermasculinity, environmental manipulation, capitalism, feel-good entitlement, and more, all in the name of God (whose perfection proves anything but). PEN/Heim Translation Fund-awarded Randall ensures that Sartori's English-language debut conveys the full impact of Sartori's scathing humor.--Terry Hong Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The narrator of Sartori's hilarious, insightful novel, his first to be published in English, is none other than God, a proper monotheistic deity stirred in a very human way by one of his own creations. In language he claims is inadequate for a lonely god, he begins to keep a diary, tracking a tall, purple-pigtailed geneticist named Daphne. He observes with increasing pique her hapless life as she goes about artificially inseminating cattle, saving endangered horny toads, and engaging in unsatisfactory sex. Her friendship with an energetic zoologist and her randy paleoclimatologist boyfriend is especially irksome to him. ("Some things that happen are so predictable that even a drunken tree sloth could see them coming.") He mocks these humans and their inebriation, their paltry appreciation of his creation like "asking a protozoan to describe an elephant: he could tell you about an infinitesimal portion of one hair on the scrotum." And yet God becomes so smitten with Daphne that-after attempting to distract himself by watching a couple of galaxies collide-he succumbs to intervening in the most diabolical manner. On page after laugh-out-loud page, this articulate God-and author-cover just about every cynical and lofty concept concerning one's own existence that humans ever pondered. This is an immensely satisfying feat of imagination. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
So here's God, hanging out in the universe and falling for a tall, skinny geneticist on Earth who's insemintating cows and couldn't care less about Him. He even professes innocence when the scientist who's also fallen for the geneticist keeps having accidents. Meanwhile, He reflects on faith, science, capitalism, and His presumed greatest creation, humans, whose worst imperfection is the couple: "I personally have never seen a pair of penguins shouting vile accusations at each other about mothers-in-law or nail scissors." He also considers pushing up the explosion of Andromeda by two billion years. VERDICT What a great character study, told in a voice that's both sardonic and captivating. For all readers except the most devout. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Italian author Sartori's English-language debut, a jaded God fixates on a female geneticist down on Earth while commenting in diary form on the sad state of humanity."The reason human beings are in such a bad way is because they think," the self-described "Big Poobah" declares in his opening salvo. Why is thinking bad? Because it is "by definition sketchy and imperfectand misleading." For God, who himself deals in paradoxes and circular reasoning, the Bible is an "unreliable and delusional" fiction. But for all his superiority and ability for "perfecting perfection," the Almighty can't avoid mortal feelings. What will he do with his growing infatuation with the geneticist Daphne, to whom he is attracted despite the fact that she's a militant atheist who burns crucifixes and hacks the Vatican's website? Like the angel in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, God finds himself considering what it would be like if he experienced life as a human. While Sartori surfs breezily enough on a tide of deep thoughts, the book lacks the sharpness or real sense of risk that would make it resonate. Sartori might also want to reconsider having God say things like, "I have nothing against homosexuals, but if I created men and women, it was for some purpose, if you know what I mean."Sartori's philosophical fantasy succeeds in getting us to ponder life's big questions from fresh angles but is short on fresh insight. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
