An imaginary life Book

"Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some line of my writing escaped the banning of my books from all the libraries and their public burning, my expulsion from the Latin tongue? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved it, or committed it to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth? Has some phrase of mine slipped through as a quotation, unnoticed by the authorities, in another man's poem? Or in a letter? Or in a saying that has become part of common speech and cannot now be eradicated? Have I survived?" (p.12)




"Statuia lui Ovidiu" by Ettore Ferrari
(Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 ro via Wikimedia Commons)

David Malouf's prose deserves a 5 star rating. The Australian author is a true master when it comes to describe landscapes, scenery, nature, and human emotions. His writing style is beautiful, hypnotic, and at times simply breath-taking.

"Winter here is a time of slow-smoldering resentments, of suspicion, of fantasies that grow as the days move deeper into the year's darkness and the cold drives us closer together and further apart." (p.96)

In his novel 'An Imaginary Life' Malouf sets out to share his ideas of what could have happened in Tomis, a place near the Black Sea at the edge of the Roman Empire, where the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC - 17/18 AD) was exiled in 8 AD by the Roman Emperor Augustus. Very little is known about Ovid's exile: our knowledge derives from Ovid's writing such as 'Epistulae ex Pontus' and 'Tristia' ( The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters) and these sources are far from being reliable. In Malouf's work Ovid himself undergoes a 'Metamorphoses' (*) in Tomis when he meets a wild uncivilized boy who grew up among animals. Here Malouf draws from the experience of J.M.G. Itard and his observations of Victor, which led to the publication of Wild Boy of Aveyron. In Malouf's fictional story, however, the question arises as to whether Ovid is going to educate the child or vice versa…

In the story the urbane and sophisticated Ovid, who in real life wrote didactic poetry about "Cosmetics for the Female Face" (Medicamina faciei femineae), is utterly transformed by his encounter with the uncivilized, raw nature. For the reader who knows Ovid's work this is hard to believe and, as even Malouf admits, "would have surprised the real poet.":

"But that is exactly the point" writes Malouf in his afterword: "My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of 'the changes' live out in reality what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display." (p.156).

This sounds very challenging and I think it is - for both the writer and the reader. Even tough Malouf's use of the English language has been a wonderful experience for me, he eventually looses one star and gets a solid four star rating from me: While reading Ovid's transformation I could not overcome a growing 'New Age' feeling of the 80's as, for example, in the following passage:

"What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall to come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us." (p.134)

This feeling, of course, is my personal, subjective experience. Unfortunately, it prevents me from categorising his work as a "Modern Classic", even though Malouf's prose would absolutely deserve it.

"An Imaginary Life" has been my first reading experience of David Malouf and I am happy to have found another great contemporary author.

(*) Metamorphoses Ovid's best-known poem on Greek Mythology