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.

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.

“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

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

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.

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.

“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.

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

Beautiful lyric prose but a bit shallow and the character development needed work. In this story Ovid feels like a draft rather than a finished work. In my view, having Ovid as the protagonist of this story was unnecessary because it rises expectations that are not fulfilled. The main character of the book could have been a nameless character or could have been named ‘X’ and the effect and message of the story would have been the same or similar. Is this story a parable? Perhaps that is what it intends to be. Some readers have attempted to find similarities between An Imaginary Life and The Alchemist; frankly, I don’t see many similarities between those two books. An Imaginary Life and The Alchemist are very different but I find The Alchemist to be far more engaging for in The Alchemist all characters are interesting and have depth; hence they feel real; on the other hand, in An Imaginary life, David Malouf’s characters and narrative had potential, alas they were underdeveloped.

Moreover, while reading An Imaginary Life I never felt transported to the place and historical time in which this story takes place; in my opinion, this was one of the main issues I found with this book.

I have one additional observation: there were entire paragraphs filled with questions, rhetorical questions that Ovid asks himself, one question after the other; that was completely unnecessary. The reflections could have been there in a more direct and elaborate way.

Finally, I want to be honest here. I am an avid reader and I read good, serious literature not just best-sellers and in my opinion, An Imaginary Life is a nice little book filled with good intentions but it is ultimately an average book. Having said that, it is short, the story has some ‘peaks’, and David Malouf is a wonderful poet and this is reflected in the prose of this book; so even if as a whole the book didn’t work for me some parts of this story are a delight to read. We must also remember that often a book that doesn’t speak to some people speaks profoundly to others

There's a vibrant lucidity to Malouf's prose that I find so compelling. This is the second book of his that I've read after Ransom and in both novels I've found his writing to be simply striking. An Imaginary Life is a daring, abstract fictionalization of the poet Ovid's years in exile, and while half of me wonders about the choice in using Ovid to tell this story which could theoretically be about any person, real or fictional, the other half of me recognizes that the unique thematic nods to Ovid are no less relevant for being as abstract as Malouf renders them. As Malouf himself says 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." An Imaginary Life is unique and imaginative, told with a brilliant and succinct clarity.

This is not an historical novel. Not in the way Wolf Hall is an historical novel. It is, of course, set in history and even has as its protagonist a man who actually existed, the Roman poet Ovid, but it deals with a period—his exile at the end of his life—of which little is known. But there are a few verifiable facts. In 8 CE, Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, and this is where he died some eight years later. Whilst there, at first at least, he continues to write and ended up producing three major works, Ibis, the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which he bemoans his exile but in these he also includes a few facts about his own life which find their way into Malouf’s novel. That said he does manipulate the facts to suit himself. The Tomis of the first century was a thriving stone-built port with an agora and Greek amenities; it certainly was not “a hundred huts made of woven branches and mud” housing 300 people. This is history reimagined so if you’re a purist or a Roman scholar there’s a lot here to pick holes in. Peter Morton’s essay ‘Evasive Precision: Problems of Historicity in David Malouf's An Imaginary Life’ is worth a read in this regard.

The book really comes to life, however, during what turns out to be the last two or three years of his life, once he’s become reconciled to his fate and comfortable with his new home. At first he’s very much the fish out of water, a civilised (even privileged) man forced to live with primitives nine days' riding distance from anyone who knows the Roman tongue. Gradually he learns their language and their ways and even becomes a useful member of society taking his turn on watch and learning how to weave nets. But he’s still not one of them.

While out on his first hunting trip—an annual event which takes place every autumn as the men stock up in preparation for the long winter months ahead—he encounters the Child. This is pure fiction as the author explains in the book’s afterword:

The encounter with the Child, which makes up the main part of this book, has no basis in fact, but I have verified my description from the best account we have of such a phenomenon, J.M.G. Itard’s painstaking observations of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, which no writer on the subject can ignore.

If the locals are at one with nature the Child is Nature. He resembles a human, a child of humans, but other than that they have nothing in common. Ovid makes it his goal to civilise the boy, a task easier said than done. Catching him is easy enough—the men of the village have been hunting faster and wilder beasts than him all their lives—but after that he’s left to the poet who soon realises what an enormous gulf exists between the two of them.

That an Australian wrote this book should come as no surprise. Their mistreatment of the indigenous population is well-known, so-called civilised white men taking over their country and imposing their way of life on them assuming it was better. Different is not better and this is a lesson that Ovid learns through his dealings with the Child who, over time once trust has been established, begins to teach the old man a thing or two about his world. The main problem they have is the lack of a common tongue. With the villagers he picked up their language easily enough but in doing so realised the limitations of Latin:

When I think of my exile now it is from the universe. When I think of the tongue that has been taken away from me, it is some earlier and more universal language than our Latin, subtle as it undoubtedly is. Latin is a language for distinctions, every ending defines and divides. The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again.

His time in the village prior to having to deal with the Child is of vital importance. It’s a halfway house. How much more he would’ve struggled had he still been living in Rome and the Child arrived at his front door one day. He tries to teach the Child the language of the locals but the boy struggles; it’s too big a leap. The Child, however, teaches Ovid about the sounds of the animals and how to reproduce them.

Ovid wasn’t a nature poet…

I know the names of seeds, of course, from having used them for the beauty of the sound itself in poems I have written: coriander, cardamom. But I have no idea what any but the commonest of them look like

…but here all there is in nature and so he begins to learn to look at the world anew. He discovers a poppy one day and the shock of seeing it results in an epiphany:

We give the gods a name and they quicken in us, they rise in their glory and power and majesty out of minds, they move forth to act in the world beyond, changing us and it. So it is that the beings we are in the process of becoming will be drawn out of us. We have only to find the name and let its illumination fill us. Beginning, as always, with what is simple. Poppy, you have saved me, you have recovered the earth for me. I know how to work the spring.

It is about to begin. All my life till now has been wasted. I had to enter the silence to find a password that would release me from my own life.

This is early in the book and we can see too that Ovid is not a religious man—“ the gods (who do not exist)”—but what we have here is more of a spiritual awakening and the eventual encounter with the Child is its catalyst: he is about to metamorphose. But into what?

There was a time where Australia was very much a land of myth to us here in the UK. We knew of Ned Kelly, barbies and kangaroos and that was about it. Then we saw Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mad Max and suddenly started to realise there was more to place. Much more. Because of its subject and setting it’s easy to not think of An Imaginary Life as a great Australian novel but in a recent article in The Conversation tDallas J. Baker comes to the book’s defence.

Me? I’m not a spiritual man. I’ve tried to be and gave it up as a bad job. I’m also about the farthest thing from a nature poet as you could get. So I empathised with the Ovid at the start of this book. I genuinely felt for the man. I wonder though about his transformation. I actually think Malouf’s novel might have quite a lot in common with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden but not having read the book I can’t say for sure. I may not be a spiritual man but I do have an imagination and I can imagine a life without computers or even books or a like mind to share things with. Robinson Crusoe this is not. This is a far more realistic tackling of the subject and a book I enjoyed far more than I expected I would. I’m a writer and words are my tools. They are far from being precision instruments but they’re all I have and I do my best. But what if they were taken away from me? What then? The writer-in-crisis was what really caught my attention here.

n   What else is death than the refusal to any longer grow and suffer change?n

This fiction is more like the journey of Publius Ovidius Naso to he's death. It may sound morbid but it is in fact an utterly fascinating view of life.

I remember reading this and thinking what an attractive mind David Malouf has. The philosophy and beliefs he wrote, though some i may not agree too or even try to entertain, makes you think. This is one of the most original and unique books i have ever read, or if there are other books like this out there, this is the first i have tried.

It tells the story of Naso, a Roman poet- who i didn't know exist until today- when he was sent to exile and thorn from he's frivolous and wealthy lifestyle and thrown in a life of barbarians and savages; where everything is simply done out of need, where they barely understand each other.

It is tells he's struggles, he's belief, how he found himself in the midst of a strangers land and the Child. It tells the story of a poet silenced- but not stilled.

n   Here is the life you have tried to throw away. here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like a disaster but is is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasion through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.n

This is the kind of book you keep in your shelves, with bookmarks and underlines, the kind of books you should read at least once in your life. I like to think of this as a kind of intriguing and definitely life changing- even in the smallest, simplest way possible- philosophical book.