This was the most refreashing perspective that I've ever read about God. Some of the characters that God inhabited were not interesting, but most were well developed. If you have a sense of humour about religion, you would enjoy this.

Questions will follow you through this entire book--questions like how? why? but... This book was a fascinating and refreshing look at a subject many people would shy away from. Although there were a few slow areas--some of the charactors God "lept" into weren't that interesting--it was worth the effort. If you are open-minded (Ferrucci's version is not a strictly "christian" version), enjoy contemplating other possibilities and can accept this for what it is (fiction), then give this a try.

It has been said that an unhappy childhood is a writer's goldmine. For writers with a healthy imagination the subjects of god and religion offer another feast of riches. While of agnostic persuasion, I do enjoy reading books on the omnipotent creator. Among recent reads, I greatly enjoyed Malamud's "God's Grace", while being far less positive about Morrow's "Towing Jehovah". I really liked Ferrucci's "Life of God" and hope that many future readers will be similarly enchanted by this bittersweet novel.

Ferrucci's god created the universe to fight his feeling of loneliness yet has no direct "omnipotent" control after the moment of productions. While any attempt at cohesion on this subject requires a varying number of impossible details to be swept under the rug, Ferrucci spins a delicate web where compassion, gentleness, humor and disappointment are essential ingredients. In this book Ferrucci starts with a retelling of the book Genesis, but spends more time on pre-human creation than the original. After creation of the monkey god encounters man after a period of absence from planet earth. The creator can choose residence in both humans and other living things and encounters and moves into a variety of historical figures and less celebrated members of the human race. Ferrucci's god meets Moses, Jesus and Buddha and seems to come to the closest agreement with the latter at the end of this book. His discussions of the image of god carried by mankind in all its variety are a highlight of this book.

The book follows the events of history including the World Wars up to present times and ends with the creator planning his departure from planet earth. The story is beautifully written and contains engaging insights in religion, the arts and ethics. I thought the encounter with the prince of darkness was a little disappointing and that Ferrucci missed a chance in not including a discussion between Nietzsche and his creator. These are, however, minor details that should not keep anyone from enjoying this gentle tale.

A literary connect-the-dots of historic facts and fiction, blurred visions of spiritual beings, and endless babble about how wrong we all were in re-formulating history. Interspersed with refreshing elements of revolutionary ideas, the momentum soon diverts into clichee and the reader is left with a pile of pulp made soggy by tears of boredom. Chance encounters with spritual beings are downgraded to the most primitive element and the fun ends there. An all too human tale of a writer lost in a paralell universe, an Italian who couldn't cope with the generic and abstract landscape of the new world. Pity those who spend not only the money, but also the time...

I had high hopes for this book, and indeed it was very interesting at first, however, it just dragged on with the same vignette repeated over and over again. Basically in this story, God creates man to understand himself better. He ends up helping us in various ways, so that man can understand his nature. That would have been interesting if it wasn't the same time and time again. The last few pages were almost interesting with God's interrogation of Mussolini, but that was even underdone.

The Life of God (As Told by Himself) is a charming knit of secular and ecclesiastic views of the world told from the viewpoint of God, Himself. God rises out of chaos and brings into being, with a scientifically approved chronology, the universe as we know it. "The truth is that the world began when it dawned on me that I was all alone and I tried to do something about it. Everything that came later was a consequence of that moment..." God creates the sun, the other stars and the planets, of which he much prefers the Earth.

So, God decides to settle on Earth and proceeds to create life, marine and amphibious. He soon grows tired of reptiles, however, and wanting "life to meditate upon itself so as to better comprehend itself," he shifts from eggs to live birth and mammals are born. Eventually, he finds in the monkey just the right blend of melancholy and humor to impel him to create the human soul.

"I would have a notion of a tree and bang, there it was roots and branches and leaves and trunk and bark, rooting in the earth, with arms flung wide in the open air." God can mold his creations, but he cannot alter or destroy them. As he, himself puts it, "I could not play around with the created world, and make and unmake as I pleased."

Ferrucci's God is likable, sweet and utterly human but he is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. More importantly, he his constantly learning from his own creations. God's world is inhabited by characters whose relationships are independent of him. who know more than he does about certain topics and who have power over one another with which he cannot interfere.

This is an extremely mobile God, capable of skimming through the cosmos and merging with any one of his creations, yet he cannot save Christ from Crucifixion, he cannot paint as well as Caravaggio nor can he understand Einstein, although he listens appreciatively. Most of the Great Minds with whom God interacts recognize him; some understand him, some ignore him and some blatantly reject him. Mozart is, of course, irreverent, Freud is quite unpleasant and Dante sees him as he is..."father and son of my very own self, the fire of intelligence that circulates through the cosmos and pours into humankind in order to attain the form of thought and words."

Translated freely from the original Italian, we are told that "it often departs freely from the Italian original and at points is better characterized as an adaptation." Translation or adaptation, the prose is always delightful, the writing is consistently witty and intelligent, sometimes even hilarious.

The Life of God does a wonderful job of reconciling the chaotic progress of human events with a higher but endearingly non-absolute power. It begins toward this end buoyed by a deft usage of anachronistic simile; the dinosaurs are "extremely conservative and not particularly bright...like old aristocrats in remote provincial towns, handing down to new generations both their idleness and a disquieting physical resemblance." Mixed among adorable descriptions such as the above are weighty and unscientific pronouncements attributed to this God, who, though no Einstein, himself, is setting in motion the meaning beneath the mystery of the natural world.

Ferrucci's decision to characterize the God who has set us all in motion as both sentient and chaotic, amiable and divine, is clever, compelling and more than eminently readable. Did Moses really spend all that time with God? Why are Bach's symphonies so utterly divine? Did Einstein ever have anyone to talk to about his work? This is both a very small and a very large idea. Ferrucci's whimsy protects this book from any serious criticism, because, after all, the book only smilingly claims to be about everything that ever happened. The Life of God (As Told by Himself) is a different but utterly charming, sweet and lovable autobiography.