An Imaginary Life (Vintage International) - Softcover

Malouf, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679767932 ISBN 13: 9780679767930

Publisher: Vintage, 1996

Synopsis

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 has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.

"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review

About this title

Review:

"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination...[a sort of] fantasia on what Ovid's life in exile might have been and, as time went by, became, as the quintessentially civilized man of letters was forced to come to terms with a harsh, pre-rational, thoroughly alien world" (Katha Pollitt New York Times)

"Elegant and resonant narrative...an exhilarating use of language" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Haunting" (Sunday Telegraph)

"David Malouf, a spare and delicate writer, presents here the first-person story of the Roman poet Ovid's exile in the distant, frosty wastes...hypnotic in its gripping accumulation of detail, its gradual unwrapping of human reality amid what at first seems a barbarian and unknowable environment. At the centre of this meticulously well-told tale is Ovid's encounter with a wild boy, brought up among the deer in the snow" (Sunday Times)

Book Description:

'A brilliantly inventive novel... Malouf puts on a dazzling literary display in this arresting, original, lyrical work' Wall Street Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679767932
• ISBN 13: 9780679767930
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160