An Imaginary Life: Amazon.ca: David Malouf: Books

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In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.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 civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.

"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Exiled from imperial Rome to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea, Ovid, the irreverent Roman poet, encounters a feral child, who teaches him the language of nature. Reprint. 10,000 first printing. NYT. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Customer Reviews

9 Reviews

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Average Customer Review

4.8 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars an extraordinary narrative of loss, hope, renewal and ending, Sep 1 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: An Imaginary Life (Paperback)

I had not heard of Malouf but am determined to read everything he has written. A book to be read in a single reading by those who are grown ups or who will be one some day. his language is remarkable and characters' inner voices are both real, and imagined in ways that transport you to the time of Augustus but are as rich in real experiences in this day as well. contact with the "other" , voicelessness of a poet without and audience, learning a new and magical culture which is primitive and fundamental. A wonderful and unexpectedly moving book with images that will last for a lifetime.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Malouf metamorphoses Ovid's last days into flawless art, Sep 20 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: An Imaginary Life (Paperback)

Reviewers are too loose with the praise, "You've never read a book like this one!" But you have not, indeed, ever read
a book like David Malouf's An Imaginary Life. He gives us the great Latin poet Ovid in a barbaric village on the shores of the Black Sea,
exiled from Rome for offending the emperor Augustus. And here he mets a strange boy, a boy who seems to have never had any human contact
before. Ovid "captures" the boy and begins to "humanize" him, but this is only the beginning of the tale, because the wild boy has something to teach Ovid
as well. By no means a typical tale of "civilized man" meeting "feral child" or "noble savage," An Immaginary Life shows
us Ovid, the poet of amoral seduction, learning to love like a father and to find, in his primitive surroundings, a form
of life he could never have discovered in sophisticated and decadent Rome. In other hands, the story might have been "mere"
fantasy or science fiction. In poet Malouf's hands, however, An Imaginary Life is a new Odyssey, but one in which the destination
is not the much-longed-for home, but an entrance into another world.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Unexpectedly gripping, involving., July 2 2000

By

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Imaginary Life (Paperback)

David Malouf, the talented Australian author of this novel, often writes of cultural conflict or misunderstanding, and he never fails to convey the tensions felt by his protagonists as they grapple with the demons they face. I probably should have had more faith when I began this novel, but the plot line is so bizarre that I couldn't imagine becoming involved with these characters. Exiled to a remote part of Asia Minor where he knows no one, does not understand the culture, and does not speak the language, the Roman poet Ovid, after failing to become an integral part of his new community, makes contact with a wild child who has been living with wolves, the only being more isolated than he. As the unlikely pair begins to communicate, the author's themes of identity, value, and truth take shape and lead to an inevitable conclusion. Ultimately, I did begin to identify with Ovid and to share the feelings of the wolf child, a tribute to the awesome ability of this author to create new worlds.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A different kind of love
There is something magical in Malouf's writing in this short novel; there is poetry in the evocation of the imagined later life of the famous Roman poet Ovid. Read more

Published on Jun 15 2009 by Friederike Knabe

4.0 out of 5 stars Back to Nature, B.C. style
Ovid, maybe the greatest Roman poet of the Augustan period, was famous not only for his "Metamorphoses" but also his works on the art of love. Read more

Published on Jun 11 2001 by Sesho