An Imaginary Life

by David Malouf

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679767932
• ISBN13: 9780679767930
• Release Date: May 1996
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

What Might Have Been

"An Imaginary Life" is one of the most mesmerizing books I've ever read and it's certainly the most poetic and beautiful. There isn't much of a plot in this book nor is it a character study. To me, it's more akin to a long prose poem (and Malouf is also a poet as well as a novelist), though it really isn't a prose poem, either. "An Imaginary Life" is a poetic flight of fancy, an impossibly beautiful reverie and a dazzling story of "what might have been yet could never be."Most of the events this book relates are, of course, imagined. We know that Ovid was exiled and we know to where, but about what happened during that exile, we know nothing, not even the date or exact place of Ovid's death.Malouf has used this absence of known facts regrding Ovid's exile to weave a gorgeously ephemeral portrait of a man and a boy who, together, find the wellspring of both humanity and love, something neither could have done alone, despite Ovid's reputation in Rome.While the storyline of "An Imaginary Life" isn't particularly mesmerizing on its own, Malouf's lush, poetic prose makes it so. This is a short book, really more of a novella than a novel and I can't imagine anyone not reading it in one sitting. One sentence simply flows into the next and I was riveted from the first page to the last.Highly recommended to anyone.

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. I do not believe the original Ovid must be read to enjoy Mr. David Malouf's book, but it certainly add to the experience. The irony is Ovid's work is probably four or five times the length, and even a greater consumer of time. A general grasp of what he wrote will suffice. The book also can be read with no reference material, and perhaps that is as the Author intended, each reader will have to decide.In his work, "An Imaginary Life", the Author takes you to an Ovid in exile. His Emperor has sent him away to a place he knows nothing of, amongst a people as different from he as perhaps can be imagined, and without the ability to communicate at all. Time facilitates the learning of language, and the differences that first are so extreme between Ovid and his fellow inhabitants moderate if they do not disappear.The catalyst for much of the effort to learn is a "creature" that also is present among Ovid and his neighbors. This is what I believe to be the "shape transformde" in Mr. Malouf's tale. Many are changed when the story is complete, perhaps most importantly Ovid. Mr. Malouf makes many points about nature, the definition of what it is to be human, and human relations. However for me this was not the most fascinating event while reading.The Author places Ovid in the midst of a situation where everything is unknown to him. Perhaps the most dramatic unknown is a young child that lives among the Deer that he is said to have grown up amongst. When Ovid becomes aware of the child, he desires to capture the boy. His experiences with his plan, his preconceptions, and the very different views of those he hunts the Child with, are fascinating, and wonderfully original. Some may argue that since this work flows as a result of the writings of one of History's great poets the work by definition cannot be unique, only derivative. And such a point is well taken.But to label this work derivative is to do the Author an injustice. He has taken a man who has greatly influenced literature, and in a manner of speaking dropped Ovid into an environment where Ovid is no longer the creator, the narrator, he is the subject. He is the subject not only of his ideas, and preconceptions, he is subject to them as well. Mr. Malouf places Ovid in an environment and with players that contain what Ovid so often wrote of. In this book he being subjected to the experience, not creating it, and Mr. Malouf pays tribute to the man by the quality of what he has created.Again the more of Ovid you bring with you, the deeper you will be able to involve yourself in the Author's purpose. I was forced to go back and refresh my memory, and because I did, I do not believe I experienced all the Author intended. If you read this after Ovid's own work, I believe the experience will be even better.

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 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.

an extraordinary narrative of loss, hope, renewal and ending

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.

Malouf metamorphoses Ovid's last days into flawless art

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.