The Last World

By Christoph Ransmayr

Book Overview

The poet Ovid, in his distress over his banishment from Rome, consigns the manuscript of his masterpiece, Metamorphoses, to the flames; years later, when rumors of his death reach Rome, his youthful admirer Cotta follows him to the remote Black Sea port of Tomi. Out of this story Christoph Ransmayr has fashioned an astonishing novel about a journey of adventure that has become Europe's most recent critical and best-selling literary sensation.

The Last World is the story of a quest. As Cotta, following a trail of clues Ovid has left behind, searches for the exiled poet and his lost work, he discovers in the rust-corroded town of Tomi an ominous scene suffused with and dominated by Ovidian mythology, a transformed place where the ancient world meets the twentieth century. Cotta is lured into a visionary landscape that impersonates Ovid's vanished poem in which the familiar is forever transmuted in new and wondrous ways. In this world the village idiot turns to stone, the ravishingly beautiful whore disappears from the face of the earth, and the ropemaker takes on the guise of a wolf. These and other singular events furnish the pieces of a puzzle that Cotta assembles into a dramatic and bewitching story--a political and cultural fable about the end of time, the last world.

Already acclaimed as a modern masterpiece and currently being translated into thirty languages, The Last World is destined to become one of the most important novels of our time. Ransmayr writes with dazzling power and sensuously charged language about the endlessly shifting flow of time, the lusty cycle of life in which the carrion of the past forever gives birth to the new. A metaphysical thriller both compelling and profound, The Last World draws the reader into a universe governed by the power of mythology, a world of decay on the brink of apocalypse. A novel about exile, censorship, and the destruction of the planet--as well as its constant renewal--The Last World is a cultural and political fable that is blazingly topical, yet timeless.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802134580
• ISBN13: 9780802134585
• Release Date: May 1996
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Die letzte Welt - most fascinating and poetic book of now

The borders of the past and the present do not count any more. Fiction and reality take place in same time. To read this poetic and beautiful but dark lines, to imagine how Ovids exile at the Black Sea passed by, to get to know the old and strange stories of roman and greek mythologie, ... It is not at all amazing that Ransmayr got the highest european literature price for the Last World in 1992. How actual his story is shows the example of Romania of 1989 where the publication of the Last World was forbidden.

Die letzte Welt - The last world

This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. Ransmayr received the highest european literature price for the "Last World" together with Salman Rushdie in 1992. Fiction and reality come together. The borders between the past and the present do not count any more in his world. To imagine how Ovids life at the Black Sea must have been, to read this beautiful dark and poetic language, to come into the world of roman and greek mythologie, that is the wonder that Ransmayr did with his story. He is a wonderful storyteller but as the book was forbidden to be published in Romania before 1989, it shows that there is more "between" the lines. All his other books are very recommandable too.

Excellent but challenging novel

This novel has a very Eastern European flavor, with attitudes about power and empire that recall another Austrian, Robert Musil. Ransmayr's writing is beautiful and he has an excellent voice. I found it to be difficult, but very rewarding in the end.

Opaque but magnificent

More dense and literary than his "The Terrors of Ice and Darkness," but possibly even more rewarding. The richness, skill, and polish of Ransmayr's style are truly impressive; he evokes an entire imaginary world (a sort of 20th-century Roman Empire) with sparse but effective details. The plot concerns a man's search for the exiled poet Naso (more commonly known as Ovid, the 1st-century A.D. Roman writer), who has disappeared from the town of Tomi, a remote town on the Black Sea Coast to which he has been banished by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Cotta (Naso's admirer) finds no Naso, but in Tomi he experiences a decaying community in the grip of just such transformations as Naso describes in his works of literature. Tomi becomes a microcosm for a world of exile, loneliness, fugacity, and ultimately renewal. The book is demanding, but the end, which is redemptive and transformative without being mawkish, brings the strands of the novel together extremely skillfully. One is left wanting to reread "The Last World" immediately to savor its themes more fully. I found reading it a bit like tucking into a delicious meal, even though I didn't necessarily know exactly what I was eating.