An Imaginary Life by david malouf

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

A beautifully written story by Malouf in which he imagines what the exile of Ovid from Rome was like. Malouf places Ovid in a village of primitive people in which he must learn their language and customs. As he adapts to the village he discovered a child living in the wild with wild animals and decides to attempt to tame him. The writing is very lyrical and has an almost dreamlike quality.

0 0 Reply

ArcherKinao

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Em sentido figurado diria que este pequeno livro começa por flutuar num curso de rio plácido, corriqueiro, mas a dado momento as correntes provocam uma agitação tamanha que o percurso deixa de ser linear e a navegação prossegue ao sabor de factores externos, sem controlo.

A partir de duas personagens reais, Ovídio – poeta, e Victor - o menino selvagem, David Malouf imagina esta expedição surpreendente.

"Fui por obra da mais alta autoridade conhecida, atirado para o que na verdade é outra ordem de seres, esses que ainda não saltaram sobre um buraco na sua cabeça e se tornaram totalmente humanos, que ainda não entraram naquilo que chamamos sociedade e se tornaram romanos à luz da lei.
(…) Oiço-os falar. Os sons são bárbaros, e a minha alma sofre pelo refinamento da nossa língua, o latim, essa língua perfeita através da qual todas as coisas podem ser ditas, mesmo os pronunciamentos do exílio." Pág. 26

Ovídio, em exílio num lugar remoto, acaba por ter uma jornada até ao mais fundo de si próprio, o seu eu em toda a sua dimensão.

E nós, somos igualmente convidados a reflectir.

"A sua vida, ano após ano, deve ter sido apenas aquilo que agora vejo, trabalho, sono, trabalho. E no entanto parece-me estranho, com a sua dignidade que me faz sentir tolo e aturdido. A minha vida tem sido tão frívola. Criado para acreditar nos meus nervos, inquietação, diversidade, mudança; completamente educado pelos livros, vivendo sempre num estado de suave segurança, capaz de mimar-me a mim próprio, de vaguear numa nuvem de ternas sensações, e com confortáveis noções de inteligência, sociabilidade, gentileza, educação; movido por tudo a que posso dar nome, não acreditando em nada que não possa ver; nem por um momento desafiado por nada que um rapaz não consiga suportar, tendo aprendido cedo a tornear todas as questões com elegância e estilo – que posso conhecer das forças que moldaram este homem domador de cavalos, cuja natureza animal de certo modo ele contém em si e amansa?" Pág. 39

A descoberta deste mundo diferente, mais genuíno, mais próximo dos primórdios da criação, é descrita de uma forma extraordinária.

"Cada vez mais, nestas últimas semanas, comecei a compreender que este lugar é o verdadeiro destino de que tenho andado à procura, e que a minha vida aqui, ainda que dolorosa, é o meu verdadeiro destino, do qual passei toda a vida a tentar fugir. «Eis a vida que tentaste atirar fora. Eis a tua segunda oportunidade. Eis o destino que tentaste rejeitar inventando uma centena de falsos papéis, uma centena de falsas identidades para ti próprio. Inicialmente parecerá um desastre, mas é realmente a boa sorte disfarçada, uma vez que o destino também sabe como seguir as tuas evasões sob uma centena de formas da sua própria autoria. Agora, finalmente, poderás tornar-te aquele que pretendias ser.»
Assim acabei por admitir abertamente o que há muito sabia no meu coração. Agora pertenço a este lugar. Tornei-o meu. Estou a entrar nas dimensões do meu eu." Pág. 86

Fiquei cativada pelo cuidado estilístico e pela subtil erudição do autor com que sustenta a sua arquitectura narrativa, que tem como pano de fundo a problemática das relações do homem com a Natureza.

0 0 Reply

sunatsf

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

“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

0 0 Reply

GNashUchiha

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Pouco se sabe da vida de Ovídeo após Augustos o ter banido de Roma rumo ao exílio para os limites do mundo então conhecido. O que Malouf fez foi um exercício de pura imaginação onde usou os trunfos a que já nos habituou: uma narrativa repleta de sensibilidade e uma mestria nata no domínio das palavras.

O encontro com uma criança selvagem e a tentativa de humanizar este ser bravio, acaba dando uma reviravolta e despertando dúvidas no poeta quanto ao sentido da sua vida anterior numa sociedade culta e civilizada, assim como acorda um instinto primitivo de união com a natureza, não no sentido de simplesmente usufruir o que ela põe ao dispor do ser humano, mas de uma harmonia e comunhão totais, primitivas e recíprocas.

"De pulvere venimus, in pulverem revertemur."
Génesis 3:19

0 0 Reply

tcubed

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

An Imaginary Life is an apt title. Malouf's prose has a life flowing through it. Cold winters, autumnal wilds, burial rituals, and shaman magic combine to create an eerie and uncomfortable atmosphere that surrounds Ovid's exile in Tomis. Rough characters rub on him, and a life away from the Epicureanism of Rome rekindles him. Spirits that Ovid doesn't believe in drive the actions of the superstitious people and the Child, a confusing and distant (human?) being who ends up teaching Ovid more than Ovid teaches him. The journey of mind, language, and seasons has a natural progression that gives a sense of cyclical time, giving the minute details the importance that they deserve. Malouf's plot works so well that the protagonist didn't need to be Ovid or be set in the ancient world. I have read most of the Metamorphoses and Amores in Latin, and while Ovid grows and learns, without the necessary background I know I wouldn't have enjoyed the story as much. Minor gripes aside, Malouf does great work writing about what makes a human a human. Maybe there is more truth in simplicity than in complexity. I wouldn't have a problem subscribing to that idea.

0 0 Reply

uzee

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Sure, I picked it up and the thrift store as it was a reputable publisher and the blurb describing it as about Ovid's exile on the Black Sea seemed like an interesting topic for a historical novel. Well, surprise, that's not at all the point of this really interesting novel about a cultured man encountering first a more primitive culture, and then a feral child. Thus the real point of the thing is a narrative journey along the borderland between culture and nature, pampered city dwelling humans, the barbarians at the edge of nature, and a lone creature raised, it would seem, by wolves.

The prose is quite lovely and the narrative voice mostly exquisitely complex and eloquent as he charts his journey beyond the social Roman world toward the unknown lands that perhaps lie more in humankind's past than either its present or future. Only once in a while there was a word or phrase that struck me as anachronistic, but they were quickly forgiven as the whole thing was just wonderfully engrossing. I read almost all of it in a single commute to and from work, utterly entranced. I will keep an eye out for Malouf's other books now for sure.

0 0 Reply

Rorio_

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

“Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree.”

Journeys in the conventional sense take us from one physical point to the next. They are often very sensory experiences. We may sail day and night upon rough waters and taste the splayed salt on our lips. We may walk for many miles under an unforgiving sun and feel the dryness of our throats. We come in contact with others along the way who affirm, change, mold, teach, question. Through language we interact, we externalize, and we become a very small part of a tremendously greater whole.

What if that greater whole was suddenly unreachable and your former self so far from you it becomes almost a figment of your imagination?

The journey in An Imaginary Life is an internal one, full of so many wonderful discoveries of freedom that I am left typing this review through tears. I was incredibly moved by the transformation of Ovid throughout this book. In the beginning of his exile, Ovid seems almost child-like because he’s become so incredibly dependant on a life of comfort and knowledge. He’s a lost man, close to not even existing in his strange new home. His power (through word) has been taken from him. Ever so slowly, however, he begins to renounce his previous life (even going so far as to call it ‘frivolous’) as his personal transformation becomes more and more apparent. Through his later connection with a child of the wilderness, he is almost reborn. His ties to the Great Mother are cultivated, loved, nurtured. Ovid releases his prior notions of self and finds comfort, peace, and happiness from deep within. Quite unexpectedly, his exile provides him the very freedom he requires to find his true self.

This book is a simple one, and one without many twists and turns. Some will love it, some will hate it. I’ve read some reviews where people didn’t enjoy it because it wasn't very 'Ovidian’ in style. I agree with this statement – the lush poetics of the Ovid residing in Rome aren’t overly present here. What is present is a beautiful, simply-told struggle of a man’s life and it’s meaning. If this book were written in the style of Ovid, then I’d (obviously) have to question the transformation the author does such a splendid job of conveying. The point is that what was once Ovid’s center is beautifully and gently released into the wind as he reverts to what his true self very simply needed to be at peace.

Beautiful, philosophical, and poignant. One of the best books I’ve ever read, and one of the few that has left me in tears, wonder, and utter fulfillment.

0 0 Reply

vaultboyanthony

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Dazzling. It raises questions about humanity,language and much more,all immersed in a prose that absolutely,beautifully sings.

0 0 Reply

Leave a Review

You must be logged in to rate and post a review. Register an account to get started.

An Imaginary Life

david malouf

This edition

More editions

About the author

david malouf

Readers also enjoyed

Community Reviews