★ 12/03/2018
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.)
I Am God
Narrated by Bruce Conner
Giacomo SartoriUnabridged — 4 hours, 50 minutes
I Am God
Narrated by Bruce Conner
Giacomo SartoriUnabridged — 4 hours, 50 minutes
Audiobook (Digital)
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Overview
2019 Foreword INDIE Gold Award for Literary Fiction
A Financial Times Best Book of 2019
Diabolically funny and subversively philosophical, Italian novelist Giacomo Sartori's I Am God is the diary of the Almighty's existential crisis that erupts 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.
Editorial Reviews
Who better to reflect on the state of the planet than its creator? I Am God is by turns funny, sad, outrageous, and tender—a cosmic romp.
A playful, exciting, mockingly modern voice, translated, what’s more, by one of the few translators who can really make the Italian vernacular sing truly and fluently in English.
I am God is like a mirthful dream made real by the ingenuity of Sartori’s prose and Randall’s splendidly pointed and sly translation.
I Am God is an almost outrageously charming book.... Giacomo Sartori takes a simple, playful premise and sets the universe crazily spinning. The Italian writer has conjured up a delicious, comical stream of omniconsciousness: a pensive diary by the original omniscient narrator, God. Sartori’s God, a being of authentic complexity and paradoxical humanity, of both otherworldly dignity and satirical absurdity, is an irresistible character.... His withering pronouncements resemble the dry, intelligent wit of a celestial Oscar Wilde more than the crash of vengeful thunderbolts from on high. And his aim is true.... Sartori’s humor, godlike, infus[es] every part of the book from the premise to the plot to the venal, amiably clueless characters to the language of the diary narrated in the celestial being’s intelligent, deadpan voice.... The elegant, easy-going translation by Frederika Randall is convincing and conversational, reveling in the diary’s asides, footnotes, and parentheses in which God is constantly setting the record, and the reader, straight.... Sartori has bestowed on us a narrative that is both comforting and disconcerting. His main character is preposterous and genuine, a supremely confident supreme being discovering the immensity of human insignificance, the wonders of confusion and vulnerability, the limitless frustrations of language and love and, of course, sex.... He’s large, he contains multitudes, and he is the ultimate unreliable narrator.”
—Cathleen Schine, New York Review of Books
This novel is an utterly serious and wildly comic test of the strange idea we take for granted in reading prose fiction—the pretense of the omniscient narrator.... By speaking in the voice of God, Sartori has simplified the premise and complicated the result of writing as such.... This God [is] the brilliant, hilarious, and utterly believable creation of Sartori.”
—James Livingston, The New Republic
I Am God is compulsively readable, with passages so crisp and funny that readers will want to read them aloud. Sartori, an Italian scientist, has written a book that, beyond its philosophical wit, draws attention to hypocrisy in all forms.”
—Cindy Pauldine, the river’s end bookstore (Oswego, NY)
A highly original novel, showing that there is, thankfully, more to Italian fiction than Elena Ferrante.” —Howard Davies, Financial Times, Best Books of 2019: Critics’ Picks
In this riotous philosophical romp, Sartori has invented an omniscient narrator like no other and an identity crisis with truly cosmic implications. Poignant, hilarious, and serious by turns, this is a jeu d’esprit with both heart and mind.
What a funny, smart book that tweaks a kind of philosophical view of ‘God’s’ work against the quandary of said God falling in love with an odd young woman scientist, which throws him off his game. You’ve got to love both his problem and his surprise at his compulsion to drift back into it regularly while he discourses on the waywardness of humans in general. Giacomo Sattori is a wizard here with the way his light touch in fact is anything but, providing readers with a most entertaining read full of necessary, shall we say, unexamined hubris on the part of all characters within our author’s focus. What a refreshing delight.
Delightful, strikingly current, infectiously readable.... The irrational pull of erotic love has never had a funnier incarnation than the one in I Am God.... Sartori pulls out all the stops in a long tradition of first-person confessions by the Creator, beginning with the Ten Commandments... Transcending mere blasphemy, Sartori refuses to take the Lord’s name in vain. Every little chapter of I Am God forces the reader to decide whether laughter or outrage is the proper response. There’s a grand tradition of Italian artists (Dante, Michelangelo, Verdi) who shock us with their new and unsettling images of God. In his modest and profound way, Sartori belongs in this terrific company.”
—Michael Alec Rose, BookPage
I Am God is compulsively readable, with passages so crisp and funny that readers will want to read them aloud. Sartori, an Italian scientist, has written a book that, beyond its philosophical wit, draws attention to hypocrisy in all forms.”
—Cindy Pauldine, the river’s end bookstore (Oswego, NY)
Sartori’s Daphne is one of the most emblematic and convincing female characters in recent Italian literature. She’s a free woman, highly intelligent, convinced of the power of science. God observes her daily, he inspects her closely, and he is jealous. Finally he becomes obsessed, observation slowly giving way to infatuation. These pages of I Am God are wrapped in immense tenderness, as the supreme being becomes shaken, and vulnerable.
Hilarious. Sartori is fully in control of his ambitious satirical design. He never forces the laughs (although one often laughs) and he never allows the tone to wander off track. A comic fable about the fate of women and the planet.
03/01/2019
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.
2018-11-13
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 imperfect—and 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.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940178439883 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribd Audio |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2022 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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