Again from the archive. This is a review of Giacomo Sartori’s brilliant, hilarious, heartbreaking novel, I Am God (2016), translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall and published by Restless Books in 2019. I post it today because no one read it then—except the translator, who liked it—and because I just wrote another review for The New Republic, this time of three new books on central banking in these times of massive, chronic, indeed endless economic crisis: Lev Menand, The Fed Unbound (Columbia), Ben Bernanke, Monetary Policy in the 21st Century (Norton), and Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time (Atlantic).
Also because I sent the draft to an old friend from graduate school who knows this stuff as well as or better than I do. He wrote back saying that the world has changed so much in the the last three years that all paradigms are moot, at best. I’ve urged him to write up a full remonstrance like the one John McClure did about “God Talk.” We’ll see. I’ll post the new review when (if?) TNR runs it.
https://newrepublic.com/article/153753/writing-end-times