An Imaginary Life

Description

"In the first century A. D., 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 out 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 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."

Promotion info

'A brilliantly inventive novel... Malouf puts on a dazzling literary display in this arresting, original, lyrical work' Wall Street Journal

Reviews

"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination...[a sort of] fantasia on what Ovid's life in exile might have been and, as time went by, became, as the quintessentially civilized man of letters was forced to come to terms with a harsh, pre-rational, thoroughly alien world" -- Katha Pollitt New York Times "Elegant and resonant narrative...an exhilarating use of language" Sunday Telegraph "Haunting" Sunday Telegraph "David Malouf, a spare and delicate writer, presents here the first-person story of the Roman poet Ovid's exile in the distant, frosty wastes...hypnotic in its gripping accumulation of detail, its gradual unwrapping of human reality amid what at first seems a barbarian and unknowable environment. At the centre of this meticulously well-told tale is Ovid's encounter with a wild boy, brought up among the deer in the snow" Sunday Times