An amazingly poetic narrative. I love this book! Read it years ago and it's one of my all time favorites.

I first read this book in high school because it was one of many on that year’s reading list and it was chosen by the powers that be as one of four all students in my grade would study. I didn’t have great memories of it or any memories really and having read it again, I know why: it’s one of those books that make teenagers think they hate reading when really what they hate is poorly chosen books.

An Imaginary Life is a fictionalised version of a short period in the life of Ovid, a Roman poet who was exiled from Rome in AD 8. According to a note at the back of the book from the author, very little is known about Ovid and David Malouf relied heavily on two lengthy poems the poet wrote while in exile to construct the details of the imagined story.

However, the title may also refer to a child Ovid encounters during his time in exile in the village of Tomis. He first encounters the child when he is a child himself and since almost fifty years has passed before the next encounter, it’s unclear whether it’s the same child (and therefore imaginary) or a different child who reminds him of the child from his youth. Either way, the child appears to be wild, potentially raised by wolves, and he lacks language and social skills.

Because Ovid is so consumed by the boy’s existence, he and the villagers capture the boy and take him back to their village where Ovid attempts to civilise and educate him. They get off to a rocky start. The child drinks his ink, refuses to wear clothes or eat and masturbates in full view of others as a self-soothing mechanism. Eventually they come to a silent agreement to co-exist, perhaps because they are both outsiders and the villagers trust neither of them. But when the village leader’s grandson falls sick, the superstitious villagers know exactly who to blame.

I really struggled to get through this book. It shouldn’t have been hard because it’s only 154 pages long but I fell asleep seven times while reading it. There are multiple reasons for that. The writing is flowery, unbelievably flowery – which sort of makes sense since it’s supposedly being written by a poet – but instead of coming across as poetic, it was instead slow, boring, repetitive (in both the use of specific words and descriptions of individual incidents) and, in some places, contributed to a complete lack of understanding of what was going on. There are huge amounts of description, so huge that by the time the description finished and returned to the actual story, I could barely remember what the story was and why that description had been necessary.

Ovid’s decision to capture the boy also rankled. Maybe it was a commentary on how people in authority or positions of admiration or power always think they know how others should live their lives or maybe it was a metaphor for trying to recapture a happier time in his life, but from the first moment the boy is taken against his will into the village, it’s clear that it’s a pointless exercise. The boy remains unhappy for the duration of his stay and is prevented from being who he is, simply because he is different, and the effect is to drive a further wedge between Ovid and the people of the village.

There is almost no dialogue in this book, just page after page of dense prose, and again it makes sense since Ovid doesn’t speak the language of the villagers and they don’t speak his, but it also makes for such a difficult reading experience. No breaks, no white space, no let up.

I understand why it’s the kind of book that would have been chosen for a school reading list – because it’s full of things that pretentious English teachers can ask students what the author really means underneath the veil of the flowery language – but it lacks the three basic things that readers are looking for: interesting plot, complex characters and good writing. All I can say is that I hope it’s not still being chosen for high school English classes. After all, if students are going to being studying literature to see both what’s on the surface and the hidden depths, can’t we start at the top with Shakespeare and forget these pale imitations in order to encourage them to love reading instead of scarring them for life?

In a word: tedious.

This book is absolutely sublime.

A fictional account of the later life of the Roman poet Ovid. History records that he was exiled from Roman territory for transgressions unknown. This book describes the poet's time in exile in which he encounters a feral child who hearkens back to dreams that he had as a child himself. He befriends the Child (the book capitalizes it throughout), initially to bring him into humanity. This is fraught with difficulty and eventually, the roles are reversed and the aged poet is introduced to the natural world and a sort of pantheism. In some ways, it underlying the story is a very Platonic narrative in which Ovid discovers his own true nature. In other ways it is about how we can transform ourselves through imagination. Book loaned to me by Amy.

Malouf is a wordsmith, dropping his readers into the heart of the story, taking us on a journey of humanity, reality and poetry.

This would have been a great little short story if it were missing about 110 pages of navel-gazing ruminations about who-fucking-gives-a-shit, but you need that stuff to make a pretentious, self-important novel of the kind that cause high school juniors to give up reading fiction entirely, so I guess: too bad.

An interesting short historical fiction novel set at the edge of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. The story is told by Ovid, a famous a Roman poet. He is 50 years old and has been banished to an isolated village on the shores of the Black Sea. Ovid learns to speak the language of the unsophisticated barbarians. He encounters a young wild boy and tries to civilise him, with mixed results.

A short novel with many poetic descriptions. A book about belonging and exile.

This book was first published in 1978.

A re-read; one of Malouf's great pieces; Ovid in exile, and it reads as it should, a dreamlike prose poem that's wild and beautiful.

I'm awestruck but this novel. I'm not sure why I didn't give it 5 stars, possibly only because it so short, and I prefer a longer novel with a bit more detail, but for it's length, it leaves an impression. Beautiful prose that speaks to something within. I am already looking forward to reading it again, which I have to do since I'm doing my final exam essay on this book.

An astonishing feat of the imagination. Two thousand years after the poet Ovid was banished to the Black Sea coast, the Aussie novelist David Malouf dared to imagine his life and death among the barbarian tribes at the edge of the frozen steppe. A work of great beauty and sensitivity, and a lyrical meditation on youth and age, words and dreams, nature and civilization. In the end, Ovid will step away from Tomis with the spirit-child who has accompanied him ever since his earliest days on his father's Roman farm sixty years previous, and Ovid will die on the banks of a shallow stream as spring turns to summer across the immensity of the grasslands. The very poet of Metamorphosis metamorphoses back into the beloved earth.

None of this is known, because no account exists of Ovid's death or his burial site among those unlettered tribes. But Malouf imagines it - and he makes it so.

Last fall, I spent a long day driving from Odessa to Constanta - a drive of some 10 hours that took me across those grasslands, across the steppe, across the Danube on an iron ferry, right down to the port city of Constanta which is where the village of Tomis once stood. The celebration of the exiled poet starts from the gates of the city, from the airport gates. I didn't have time to explore - what survives now after all at the distance of a couple of millennia - but I was glad all the same to have touched that piece of earth. I remember loving Malouf's novel on the Great War back in Bangladesh some 25 years ago, and I have wanted to read his imagination of the exiled poet for a long time. I am glad I did - and I hope that Christoph Ransmayr's book also on the same poet and the same exile will live up to the one that I have just finished.

This book is just the title indicates: the imagined life is that of the Roman poet Ovid during his last years. The writing is lovely and the simple story is deeply moving.

I gave up reading this. Interested in Ovid as I might be, I couldn't shake the primary sense that the author was making up the text as he went, which, presumably, in some sense he was.

One of the reasons I read little fiction, and truth be told, not so many books.