Imaginary Life: Amazon.ca: David Malouf: Books

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Product Description

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 alternate Paperback edition.

Ingram

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.

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9 Reviews

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4.8 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Back to Nature, B.C. style, Jun 11 2001

By	Sesho "www.sesho.libsyn.com" (Pasadena, TX USA) - See all my reviews

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. It was these works which dragged him into scandal and censorship of his works. Yes, as long as there has been authority, authority has been afraid of rebels. For his scandalous works and perhaps for some political reasons Ovid was exiled to the ends of the empire, the equivalent of Siberia to the Romans. He would live out the rest of his days away from everything and everyone he had ever known. This work tries to chronicle his thoughts and actions in those last years in the village of Tomia on the Black Sea. Ovid only has the memories of his past to give him consolation in his loneliness. In particular, he has memories of encounters with a wild boy raised by wolves that he last saw as a young boy. During a hunt with the villagers he sees what he believes to be this very same wild boy. He convinces the village headman to capture the boy and Ovid sets about trying to civilize the Child into what he believes to be humanity. Ironically, it is Ovid who finds himself being educated. This is a short and beautiful book. Its transcendent message of casting off the past and finding your destiny is one very relevant to our age. We have lost touch with primal nature.

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

By A Customer

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

By A Customer

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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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 9 months ago by Friederike Knabe

5.0 out of 5 stars Of shapes transformde to bodies strange
The title of this review is from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It has been quite some time since I read of Hercules, Pygmalion, Thisbe, and a host of others. Read more

Published on Jan 22 2001 by taking a rest

5.0 out of 5 stars Unexpectedly gripping, involving.
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... Read more

Published on July 2 2000 by Mary Whipple