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An Imaginary Life

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"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.

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.

This is an extraordinary, fascinating, and deeply moving book. Malouf brilliantly takes Ovid's exile to the furthest outpost of the Roman empire and makes of it a beautifully written, beautifully executed meditation on imagination and "what it is to be human." It is a strangely liberating book, for, to quote the text, "We are free to transcend ourselves. If we have the imagination for it."

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. Taking as a starting point the scant knowledge available about Ovid's time in exile in a remote place at the edge of the Empire, the author creates a rich physical and a deep emotional and philosophical landscape in which Ovid discovers a new sense of humanity and identity.

Exiled to Tomis, a remote outpost on the Black Sea, he starts out as a tolerated outsider. Nobody knows or cares for who he was. This is a different culture, far away from the sophistication and pleasures of Rome. Life here is basis, "barbaric", confined to survival in a rough climate. Malouf beautifully evokes the poet's mental transformation from the somewhat dismissive outsider to an appreciative follower, and later member, of the community. In the process he also questions his own worldview and the society he left behind. "I begin to see briefly, in snatches, how this old man, my friend, might see the world. It is astonishing. Bare, cruel, terrible, comic. And yet, daily he seems nobler and more gentle than any Roman I have known. Beside him I am an hysterical old woman. Utterly without dignity." Ryzak, the old man, teaches Ovid more than the local language; he is the cornerstone of his survival, guide into the local traditions, protector against the hostile old woman...

While the seasonal routines control the rhythm of life here, the protagonist finds out more and more also about the mysteries of the place, the metaphysical beliefs of the locals, and the evil spirits that haunt the forests. And then, suddenly there appears "the Child", physically aged about eleven, a feral creature whose existence in the forest cannot be explained. As a young child, Ovid knew such a spirit (?) child, saw him and communicated with him in a "tongue of our own devising". As he was growing up into a young man, the child disappeared, although he kept dreaming him and their exchanges. Is this wild boy the same Child? Will he be able to communicate with him, re-dream their connection? Why is he there, impervious to the danger of wild animals and the extreme weather? Will the fear among the locals chase him away or even destroy him? Ovid is torn between dreams and realities. The outcomes are dramatic and deeply experienced by all concerned and the ending not as one would expect.

Malouf is a magician with language, no doubt. His painting of landscape is exquisite, his description of local people and customs powerful. Both lyrical and philosophical, he draws you into a story nevertheless that has momentum and drama and doesn't leave you long after you closed the book. [Friederike Knabe]

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.

In 8 CE, the Latin poet Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea (the present-day Constanta in Romania) where he lived out the remainder of his life -- a life that David Malouf has reinterpreted in his extraordinary novel. I have a strong recollection from school of the pervasive melancholy of the poems he wrote there, his TRISTIA (sorrows), and Malouf has perfectly captured the mood of a bleak existence among a barbarian people. But that is only how the book starts; gradually the novel takes the poet from sad despair to another state of mind entirely. Malouf calls upon the spirit of Ovid's most famous work, the METAMORPHOSES. And not the flamboyant transformations such as the various disguises of amorous Jupiter that so appealed to us as eighth-graders, but the gentler changes such as that of the elderly couple Philemon and Baucis who take root as trees growing in their beloved countryside. In Malouf's telling, a concept that meant nothing to me as a boy now moves me almost to tears as an older man.

"We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become." The theme of metamorphosis is introduced early, with a magnificent evocation of spring, all starting from a single poppy. "Scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off-childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind." Malouf, like the poet, is a magician with words. But words can also get in the way: "my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my BEING the sky" [emphasis mine]. Prevents him being part of the world of "wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death. We have come to join them."

Malouf's greatest stroke of genius is to introduce a wild boy: a human child, raised among deer and wolves, a naked figure occasionally spotted on hunting trips, eventually captured and brought into the village. Ovid makes him his special charge, teaching him the rudiments of speech, but also learning from him his non-verbal understanding of the land and its creatures. Although Ovid has the support of the village headman, there are forces ranged against his protégé who regard him as a predatory spirit from the alien world, and when illness strikes the village the tensions rise unbearably. Eventually the old poet and young boy set off on a journey into an unknown that he finds has been known ever since childhood. The Child's trasformation at the end of the book is every bit as beautiful as Thomas Mann's shimmering vision of the boy Tadziu at the close of DEATH IN VENICE.

I came upon Malouf some years ago, trying to get a better knowledge of Australian literature. I was fascinated by THE GREAT WORLD and FLY AWAY PETER, but held off from this book as having nothing to do with the Australian experience. How wrong I was! For the experience of coming to a strange land in punishment as an exile is exactly that of most of the original settlers. So is the encounter with a less "civilized" people; even this rough frontier community has to erect battlements against the predations of still more barbarous peoples beyond the walls -- a colonial experience reflected in books like WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS by JM Coetzee (albeit writing from South Africa at this point). But tentative connections can still be made; the sequence of teaching the Child to speak, for example, is very similar to what Kate Grenville would later describe with aboriginals in THE LIEUTENANT. And what is Ovid's exodus in the final part of the book but a journey into the outback such as that of the title character of Patrick White's VOSS, the greatest of all Australian novels?

I keep a list of the two dozen best novels I have ever read in my life. I don't care what has to bumped to make room -- even Malouf's more recent classical retelling, RANSOM -- but AN IMAGINARY LIFE will certainly be on it.

I think that one must leave their normal understanding of the common plot/thematic expectations of literature behind, if one is to truly appreciate the brilliance of Malouf's work. This is a novel that trancends the boundaries of language. Like other novels penned by this master, he manages to create within the reader, a sense of Wordworthian understanding of nature. There is a wonderful irony here. He uses language to express a world beyond language, yet the very instrument of language (the tongue ) features not as a linguistic tool, but rather, as a sensory tool that tastes ink and water. For Malouf,the world of 'An Imaginary Life' becomes a sort of Robinson Crusoe where the main protagonist is isolated from his native language and land. He must face the humility of decending from being the master of his own language with all the fame and fortune it incurred, to being an exiled man in a foreign land where his poetic brilliance is useless. He must learn humility, and it is with no small measure of pain that he does. In finding this humility, however, he finds innocence and a sense of awe inspired love for the nature around him. Perhaps it could be construed that the boy child that he meets and grows to love, is a symbolic representation of a much younger and more spiritual Ovid, before the vices of adultdhood led him to be exiled. In any case, this book is deeply magical, and the genius of Malouf is, as I suggested before, borne in his ability to express a world without language by his actual use of language. 10 out of 10. John Magee

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.

David Malouf's "An Imaginary Life" is unlike anything I've ever read. Unabashedly poetic, it's a beautiful distillation of life. Told from the point of view of Ovid (in exile), it intermingles mesmerizing imagery with painfully acute insight that, I have to admit, had me reading through tears much of the time. One can only come away from this amazing work with the sense that this is Malouf's gift to the great poet of "Metamorphoses" and "The Art of Love"; that this is the life he wished he could have lived in exile. And this is the most obvious meaning of the title "An Imaginary Life". But it also refers to the mental machinations of the poet himself: how he sees what, for others, isn't there. Furthermore (and perhaps most importantly), it illustrates how life itself can have a phantom-like quality; past mingling with present, daydreams intruding on "reality", thoughts themselves shaping each individual's concept of "what is real". Adding even more dimension to this marvelous story, is having Ovid think that the feral child that he and the barbarians find out on a hunt is The Child, the imaginary friend from his own childhood. It is The Child who saves Ovid the man.
"An Imaginary Life" is nothing short of a work of art, especially suited for those who enjoy great poetry and have, perhaps, reached at least life's mid-point.

A brilliant short novel about civilization and it's relative disadvantages. It is ostensibly about the poet Ovid's exile from Rome in the fist century A.D. and his developing relationship weather feral child on the outskirts of the empire: Civilization vs. Nature. The importance of language in the novel is questioned, makes a good departure for a book group that will discuss the impact of words. We used Malouf's flowing novel to launch our book club, and the discussion touched on various topics such as Ovid, religion, Roman history.