“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” So reads the opening verse in the Gospel of John—the fourth, deviant gospel—which was probably composed 70 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. According to Giacomo Sartori, John the Apostle got it way wrong. The Word comes toward the end of days, these days, our days, when the earth is already melting, when exodus or exile marks most of the world’s population, when God finally sits down (does a god sit?) and starts a “diary,” where he records his fumbling attempts to think, to write, to fall in and out of love. To become more human, if you will, to know what a mistake feels like, and to try to make it right.

I AM GOD by Giacomo Sartori, translated by Frederika Randall Restless Books, 224 pp., $17.99

It’s a kind of memoir, this novel, in which God recounts his obsession with a tall, lanky, promiscuous lab rat, a young woman who’s smart enough to enlist bacteria in the production of clean energy, but who just can’t find the right man. “Could it be me?” That’s God asking, knowing, like any other man, that even if He became a human being and sought her out, he might fail to charm her, or even to speak a complete sentence in her presence.

The line the author, God or Man, crosses in criticizing the human species is this: We humans are the only creatures who know that death waits for us. We acquire that knowledge around the same time we’re born into language. Knowing that we’ll die makes us neurotic—fearful, fretful, self-conscious—and this is also what makes us human, this is what makes us tell stories, about ourselves among others. And so Sartori’s God becomes human, and knows it, insofar as He writes. It’s terrifying.

Is Giacomo Sartori, a soil scientist (for real) and the author of seven novels, just another “new atheist,” making fun of religion because it’s irrational? God, no. 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. Here he is, God-like in his knowledge of past, present, and future, and yet he’s also explaining his very particular needs, desires, urges, trying on an imagined embodiment, what would come of being a man rather than a god. All good writing, fiction or non-fiction, makes this move by placing us in a world elsewhere, taking us out of ourselves, letting us live another’s life. By speaking in the voice of God, Sartori has simplified the premise and complicated the result of writing as such. This “diary” teaches its author that perfection of any kind is inconceivable. And so he finds he’s condemned to keep revising his own creation.

Sartori’s God has good reason to doubt himself. The woman he has fallen for is a serious scientist as well as an atheist and an anti-Catholic activist (she steals crucifixes and burns them for fun). Her day jobs include the artificial insemination of cows, which requires anal penetration up to her shoulders and gentle manipulation of bovine cervixes. We know this because God keeps a close eye on her day and night—no, of course, He doesn’t sleep, He has better things to do.