The Last World [Paperback]

Christoph Ransmayr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 1996

A man goes in search of the Roman poet Ovid, banished to the end of the world. He finds that Ovid's personality and stories have undergone a sea-change, and have fragmented themselves into lots of clues - people, bizarre events, odd stretches of landscape, and a story emerges.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This beautifully evocative fable resets in contemporary time the Roman world of the poet Ovidius Naso, exiled in 8 A.D. to barbarous Tomi (in modern Bulgaria) on the Black Sea. Naso's friend Cotta is seeking the poet in Tomi, now an iron-mining town, among characters who are modern counterparts of mythic figures in Naso's Metamorphoses , in which humans were transformed into stars, animals, trees, rocks. Affirming their link to the savage landscape, these people reenact ancient myths, e.g., Dis and Proserpina, gods of Hades, are now Thies, a refugee German grave-digger and his quarrelsome fiancee. Cotta finds the theme of transformation in the mimes of carnival revelers, and in films projected on the slaughterhouse wall of Tereus the butcher. That great authors cannot be silenced, and that myth permeates our lives, are two messages of a book that sometimes stretches too far in its effort to emulate the style of Ovidian epic poetry. Wood's translation from the German is graceful. Ransmayr's first novel, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness , will appear in English in 1991.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This novel--currently being translated into 30 languages--evokes at its best the disintegration of ancient Rome, "a docile society that submitted to the surveillance of even its bedrooms." It is this bureaucratic, repressive society that banishes the poet Ovid. The publisher suggests that the book is a cultural/political fable. If so, it is as unclear as the steps the poet takes, which are retraced by his admirer, Cotta. In the remote port of Tomi strange metamorphoses occur: village idiot into stone, ropemaker into wolf. The reader is helped through the phantasmagoric events and myth-ridden landscape by a 36-page Ovidian repertory of characters, but even with the fine writing, the hailing of this " quest " novel as a modern masterpiece leaves this reader as mystified as the stumbling Cotta.
- Peter Bricklebank, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 246 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (May 3, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802134580
• ISBN-13: 978-0802134585
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,237,464 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Opaque but magnificent, December 1, 1997

By 

Torontocrimfan "matthewlight" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last World (Paperback)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Die letzte Welt - The last world, December 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Last World (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Die letzte Welt - most fascinating and poetic book of now, December 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Last World (Paperback)

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.