About the Author:
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.
About the Translator:
Frederika Randall grew up in Pittsburgh and has lived in
Italy for more than 30 years. A journalist and translator from
Italian, she has written cultural reportage for numerous US and
Italian publications. She translated the epic novel of the
Risorgimento, Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of An Italian,fiction by
Guido Morselli, Luigi Meneghello, Ottavio Cappellani, Helena
Janeczek, Igiaba Scego and Davide Orecchio, and three volumes of
nonfiction by historian Sergio Luzzatto. Awards include a Pen-Heim
grant, and with Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize for Historical
Literature.
“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.... 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.”
*Publishers Weekly, Starred Review*
“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.”
*Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Sixth
Extinction*
“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.”
*Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen*
“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.”
*Tim Parks, author of Italian Ways and Italian Neighbors*
“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.”
*Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation*
“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.”
*Sheryl Cotleur, Copperfield’s Books (Sebastopol, CA)*
“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
*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
*The New Republic*
“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
*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)
*Cindy Pauldine, River’s End Bookstore, Oswego, NY*
“God, famously upstaged by Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, gives a
livelier performance in Giacomo Sartori’s I Am God (Restless,
Feb.), his first novel to be translated from Italian into
English.”
—Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly Writers to Watch: Spring 2019
*Publishers Weekly*
“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
*Financial Times*
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