Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
George Braziller (1985), 154 pages
Description
In the first century AD, Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverant poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impate their dead and converse with the spirit world. But then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilisation and nature, as enacted by a poet who once catalogued the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member FicusFan
I thought this would be a regular historical fiction, about the banishment of the Roman Poet Ovid to a hamlet between the steppes and the Black Sea, by the Emperor Augustus. While it does talk about time and place it is also a more philosophical book.
Malouf has Ovid explore the idea that man and
The use of language also creates gods as the physical work creates nature. If something can be defined, or labeled, it begins to exist. Once it exists, it takes shape.
Ovid is exiled for unspecified crimes. He is in a hamlet, but totally alone because no one else speaks his language. He struggles with the harsh, empty, land which has harsh weather, and no sign of human care.
One fall on a hunt he sees a feral child. The child brings him back to his childhood, where there was another feral child. It also helps him make peace in his mind with the ghosts of his family. The feral child, the embodiment of humanity and nature, help Ovid to become more human, and more in touch with nature.
It was a mildly enjoyable read. I am just glad it was short.
Malouf has Ovid explore the idea that man and
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his striving have created the human concept of nature and gods. The working of man on the land has shaped it from one generation to the next. Each generation starts higher up the ladder from nothing to civilization, and builds upon it. Each sees where they start as virgin nature, but in fact it is an artifact created by those of the past. The use of language also creates gods as the physical work creates nature. If something can be defined, or labeled, it begins to exist. Once it exists, it takes shape.
Ovid is exiled for unspecified crimes. He is in a hamlet, but totally alone because no one else speaks his language. He struggles with the harsh, empty, land which has harsh weather, and no sign of human care.
One fall on a hunt he sees a feral child. The child brings him back to his childhood, where there was another feral child. It also helps him make peace in his mind with the ghosts of his family. The feral child, the embodiment of humanity and nature, help Ovid to become more human, and more in touch with nature.
It was a mildly enjoyable read. I am just glad it was short.
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LibraryThing member LukeS
David Malouf creates the life of Ovid in his exile by the Black Sea. This is the story of a lost spirit - Ovid no longer has Roman society to entertain and embarrass. His spirit flies from him when he's exiled, and shows up symbolized in a little boy. Ovid's soul gradually comes back to him as he
This is a lovely, artful story, and Malouf has a fan in this reviewer.
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becomes more a member of the foreign community.This is a lovely, artful story, and Malouf has a fan in this reviewer.
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LibraryThing member spiphany
The Roman poet Ovid seems to be enjoying an unusual amount of attention by writers in recent years; this is the second novel I've read which takes as its subject Ovid's last years in exile and his book the Metamorphoses. While Ransmayr's novel, "The Last World" engages more explicitly with the
The author writes in his afterword that "what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography but a fiction with its roots in possible historical event." "An Imaginary Life" is best read in this light. As a historical novel it is unsatisfactory, for the style has a particularly contemporary flavor, and the setting is scant on historical detail. Nor are the character and biography of Ovid especially crucial to the development of the story.
Instead, the "Metamorphoses" and Ovid's exile serve as the inspiration for the themes Malouf skillfully interweaves in the book. The story is narrated in the present tense, which admittedly takes some getting used to, and the passage of time seems to ebb and flow. At the heart of the story is a disillusioned poet's search for language and meaning, and the wild boy whom he takes by force from the forest and tries to teach to speak and act like a human being mirrors this search.
The spiritual message is not new, nor are the meditations on the paradoxes of civilization and the longing to return to unspoiled nature. All the same, it is elegantly told and thought-provoking.
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literary contexts, this slim book is a beautifully poetic meditation on life and death, nature and civilization.The author writes in his afterword that "what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography but a fiction with its roots in possible historical event." "An Imaginary Life" is best read in this light. As a historical novel it is unsatisfactory, for the style has a particularly contemporary flavor, and the setting is scant on historical detail. Nor are the character and biography of Ovid especially crucial to the development of the story.
Instead, the "Metamorphoses" and Ovid's exile serve as the inspiration for the themes Malouf skillfully interweaves in the book. The story is narrated in the present tense, which admittedly takes some getting used to, and the passage of time seems to ebb and flow. At the heart of the story is a disillusioned poet's search for language and meaning, and the wild boy whom he takes by force from the forest and tries to teach to speak and act like a human being mirrors this search.
The spiritual message is not new, nor are the meditations on the paradoxes of civilization and the longing to return to unspoiled nature. All the same, it is elegantly told and thought-provoking.
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LibraryThing member janerawoof
Enjoyed it for what it was, but disappointed that it was not so much a straight story about Ovid-in-exile [although that was there] as much as a meditation on the balance between civilization and nature, with psychological and philosophical underpinnings. Writing was luminous, with gorgeous
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descriptions. Worthwhile to read once but I don't feel it warrants rereading. Show Less
LibraryThing member nmele
An interesting short novel that imagines Ovid's exile and death as he searches for a way to a closer understanding of reality.
LibraryThing member JimElkins
A double allegory
"An Imaginary Life" (1978) is nominally the story of Ovid's exile and death. Ovid wrote two sets of poems from his exile in Tomis (in Pontus, a region of present-day Turkey on the Black Sea, and in Constanta, a Romanian city, also on the Black Sea), called Tristia and Epistulae ex
1. It's an allegory of poetry, because Ovid is described as redicovering poetry in Pontus. First he finds it in the people there and their shaman, whose language is not as inflected as Latin (the narrator says this several times), but is more intimately attuned to nature. Then he finds it again in the "Child," a feral child the narrator takes in. The Child can mimic animal sounds, and the narrator realizes that is en even deeper form of poetry, one that depends on empathy. (This is contrasted with the narrator's satiric and hypereloquent poetry.)
2. It's also an allegory of Australia. There are three worlds in the book: Ovid's scintillating life in Rome; his simple, superstitious life in Tomis; and "the last reality," his life in Asia, beyond the Ister (i.e., north of the Danube), with the feral child. I imagine I'm hardly the first one to say this, but Rome is like England, a distant dream of soft overfed, overindulgent people devoid of belief but rich in "dazzling lierary display"; Tomis is like Australia, a wholly new world, surrounded by nature, with only the faintest echoes of culture; and the child (and the Asian grasslands) are like Aborigines, intimately at home in nature, naturally happy, fundamentally Other. The narrator has to cross painfully from Rome to Tomis, but he accepts it and learns its language. Later he crosses joyfully from Tomis to Asia.(If this seems unlikely, consider Malouf's "Remembering Babylon," about a White boy taken in by Aborigines. The England/Australia/Aboriginal triad recurs there.)
The book is naturally about other things as well. In a brief note Malouf says he was interesed in how Ovid might have escaped "skepticisim" and found belief. And it's also a Bildungsroman, with a mystical circle of life built into it. It's a lovely, succinctly imagined, sincere, romantic book.
"An Imaginary Life" (1978) is nominally the story of Ovid's exile and death. Ovid wrote two sets of poems from his exile in Tomis (in Pontus, a region of present-day Turkey on the Black Sea, and in Constanta, a Romanian city, also on the Black Sea), called Tristia and Epistulae ex
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Ponto. Malouf used Tristia for his picture of the nearly barbarian outpost Pontus, but other than that he invented his "imaginary life." It strikes me as a double allegory:1. It's an allegory of poetry, because Ovid is described as redicovering poetry in Pontus. First he finds it in the people there and their shaman, whose language is not as inflected as Latin (the narrator says this several times), but is more intimately attuned to nature. Then he finds it again in the "Child," a feral child the narrator takes in. The Child can mimic animal sounds, and the narrator realizes that is en even deeper form of poetry, one that depends on empathy. (This is contrasted with the narrator's satiric and hypereloquent poetry.)
2. It's also an allegory of Australia. There are three worlds in the book: Ovid's scintillating life in Rome; his simple, superstitious life in Tomis; and "the last reality," his life in Asia, beyond the Ister (i.e., north of the Danube), with the feral child. I imagine I'm hardly the first one to say this, but Rome is like England, a distant dream of soft overfed, overindulgent people devoid of belief but rich in "dazzling lierary display"; Tomis is like Australia, a wholly new world, surrounded by nature, with only the faintest echoes of culture; and the child (and the Asian grasslands) are like Aborigines, intimately at home in nature, naturally happy, fundamentally Other. The narrator has to cross painfully from Rome to Tomis, but he accepts it and learns its language. Later he crosses joyfully from Tomis to Asia.(If this seems unlikely, consider Malouf's "Remembering Babylon," about a White boy taken in by Aborigines. The England/Australia/Aboriginal triad recurs there.)
The book is naturally about other things as well. In a brief note Malouf says he was interesed in how Ovid might have escaped "skepticisim" and found belief. And it's also a Bildungsroman, with a mystical circle of life built into it. It's a lovely, succinctly imagined, sincere, romantic book.
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LibraryThing member le.vert.galant
This is a beautiful novel about Ovid's years of exile in Tomis on the Black Sea in what is now Romania. Someone who has read Ovid's disparate and pleading poems from this period might expect this book to be equally bleak. Instead, Malouf depicts the poet as someone who reinvents himself through the
I understand that some reviewers see this as an allegory of Australian colonization, but for me, it is more universal: a wonderful thing in itself and a splendid meditation on language and exile.
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strange customs of this place at the extreme end of the Roman world.I understand that some reviewers see this as an allegory of Australian colonization, but for me, it is more universal: a wonderful thing in itself and a splendid meditation on language and exile.
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LibraryThing member Helenliz
I don't know what I was expecting, but this is quite unusual. It starts out with the poet Ovid, having been exiled from Rome to the edge of the known world finding himself an unwilling guest of a people who don't speak the same language and who exist in a very different environment to that which he
Thereafter, he perks up a bit and we start to know more about the people he is living with, he starts to learn their language and to understand them, while remaining an outsider. As he begins to participate in the life of the village, so we learn more about them, but that also sparks memories in him of his earlier life, his childhood as the second son, his brother and his early death, the relationship with his father. We never quite find out what prompted his exile.
And, somewhere along the way, he sees a wild boy, a human child living with the animals on the plain. He wonders how the child survives and determines to bring him back to the world of men. However this too brings a memory, when he was a child himself he seems to have had an invisible companion, and he can;t decide if the child is this invisible companion brought to life. It takes several seasons before the village combines to bring the boy in and Ovid takes over his care. The village remain sceptical and the events of the penultimate chapter, again, bring to the fore the doubt as to what this child actually is. Is he human, is he a devil, or might he be something else entirely?
There's something supernatural about the close, when the narration has changed tone entirely from the first, no longer worrying about his writing or reputation, Ovid ventures out on one more journey and finds his place in the universe, while the spirit and physical worlds remain merged in an inseperable whole.
I really had no idea what to expect of this from the brief synopsis, and I'm not sure how you go about describing it. There's something lyrical about the prose, something indefineable about the mingling of the physical and the imagined and something entirely enchanting about the care expressed by two such alien beings. I listened to this and really enjoyed it.
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is used to. In chapter 1 he is full of self doubt and there is a cry from the heart of the poet asking if any of his work will survive him, if any of his lines will exist, even if in the quotations of others. We know that this is the case, hos work wasn't all destroyed and he has survived many centuries. Thereafter, he perks up a bit and we start to know more about the people he is living with, he starts to learn their language and to understand them, while remaining an outsider. As he begins to participate in the life of the village, so we learn more about them, but that also sparks memories in him of his earlier life, his childhood as the second son, his brother and his early death, the relationship with his father. We never quite find out what prompted his exile.
And, somewhere along the way, he sees a wild boy, a human child living with the animals on the plain. He wonders how the child survives and determines to bring him back to the world of men. However this too brings a memory, when he was a child himself he seems to have had an invisible companion, and he can;t decide if the child is this invisible companion brought to life. It takes several seasons before the village combines to bring the boy in and Ovid takes over his care. The village remain sceptical and the events of the penultimate chapter, again, bring to the fore the doubt as to what this child actually is. Is he human, is he a devil, or might he be something else entirely?
There's something supernatural about the close, when the narration has changed tone entirely from the first, no longer worrying about his writing or reputation, Ovid ventures out on one more journey and finds his place in the universe, while the spirit and physical worlds remain merged in an inseperable whole.
I really had no idea what to expect of this from the brief synopsis, and I'm not sure how you go about describing it. There's something lyrical about the prose, something indefineable about the mingling of the physical and the imagined and something entirely enchanting about the care expressed by two such alien beings. I listened to this and really enjoyed it.
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LibraryThing member tandah
Poetic retelling of Ovid's banishment and his connection with the natural environment through a mystical wild boy.
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
The imagined life of Ovid suffering banishment to the edge of the Black Sea. Reading this book during a time when there is war going on in the area near the place Ovid was banished so many centuries ago seems almost surreal.
Subjects
Awards
New South Wales Premier's Literary Award (Winner — 1979)
The Age Book of the Year Award (Shortlist — Fiction — 1978)
Australia's Greatest Books (1978)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1978
Physical description
154 p.; 5.5 x 0.75 inches
ISBN
080761114X / 9780807611142