An Imaginary Life by David Malouf takes its setting from the exile of the Roman poet Ovid. He is banished to Tomis, a remote town on the outskirts of the empire where no one speaks his language. Ovid has been truly silenced by Augustus. The exile of Ovid is an event which is enshrined mystery. We know the name of the town that he was sent to, but we do not know why; some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that the exile itself was a fiction. This lack of information gives Malouf the space to explore the story that he wants to tell.

We meet Ovid after his exile as he struggles to understand (quite literally) Tomis and the people with whom he now lives. Within this cold and desolate landscape, Malouf invents a character known only as the Child, a feral boy who has been raised in the wilderness by deer. Ovid feels an instant connection to this child and it is this relationship that creates the foundation of the book.

The unmistakable theme that is woven through this tale is that of civilisation and how it encroaches on the natural world. Humankind seeks to tame the wild places that it encounters and claim the world for ourselves, believing our way of life to be the correct way of life. These two forces clash together and the question of whether they can co-exist in peace is at the forefront of every page.

Full review: https://lettersoflydia.wordpress.com/...

Ovid's Exile
31 March 2012

tThe first thing I did when I came to comment on this book was to go to my uni notes to see if I could get any inspiration from them only to discover that I didn't take any. This is not surprising because it was the last book that we read in English I and by this time I had pretty much become sick of writing down the rubbish that was coming out of the lecturer's mouth (or was too busy studying other books we had read to pay any attention to this one).

tI must admit that English I was one of the most painful subjects that I studied at university because of how the lecturers seemed to read too much into some of the books that we studied. I had decided, by the end of the year, that I would not be going on to do any more English subjects (I did, one of them was Renaissance Poetry, the other being English for Professional Purposes). Instead I jumped over to focus on Classical Studies and Ancient Greek (and was glad that I did).

tEnglish I destroyed much of my appreciation of a number of writers, including Emily Dickenson. I admired this closeted woman who would churn out poetry mourning per pitiful state, and was then told that she hated God. In my own fundamentalistic mindset at the time I suddenly rejected her as a good author and have never read any of her writings since. As for David Malouf, I simply found him to be very dull and boring.

tIt seemed that the English faculty of the Australian Educational Institutions (no such organisation, but I am bringing universities and highschools all into the fold here) love this author because he is Australian and Post-modernist. Okay, my attitude towards post-modernism may be changing slightly as I come to understand the concepts, however I am still quite antagonistic towards relativism: what you believe is what you believe and nothing can challenge that belief. Well, I may believe that the world is flat, but if I continue to do so after circumnavigating the world then I am little more than a fool.

tThis story is about Ovid, an Ancient Roman Poet who upset the powers that be at the time and was exiled to the shores of the Black Sea where he lived among barbarian tribes. In a way it is about language and about isolation. Ovid was a great poet and his epic, Metamorphoses, is one of the classic pieces of Roman literature. Malouf seems to be bringing Metamorphoses into Ovid's own life as he changes from being a civilised Roman to becoming a barbaric tribesman. This book is also existentialist in that it deals with language and their differences. Ovid speaks fluent Latin, a skill that is pretty useless where he is located. Thus he must learn from scratch how to communicate to them and become a story teller once again.

tI am not hugely familiar with Ovid's life, though I have read the Metamorphoses. That is a book about change as told through Greco-Roman mythology. What struck me the most was the opening stanzas where we see one God creating the world and creating all that is within this world. This is standard Greco-Roman creation myth, and we see the same in Apollodorus, Plato, and even Hesiod. This in turn is seen in Egyptian and Hebrew mythology. Many Christians write about how the first three chapters of Genesis were designed to set the Hebrew nation apart from the nations around them, and while I will say that that is true to an extent, it is not entirely. Many of the theologians seem to be ignorant of the actual beginnings of these ancient mythologies, particularly those that have a single supreme god creating the world. This is very true of Egypt, the location where Genesis was written, as creation came about with the god Amun willing himself into existence (Genesis says God always was) and then proceeding to produce the world and its inhabitants out of himself (Genesis says that God created the world separately from himself).

tHowever, I digress because this is not about Ovid's Metamorphoses, but rather a modern story about Ovid's exile written by a post-modernist, trying to bring the ancient philosophies into our world. In a way it is probably the Metamorphoses have prompted Malouf to write this book, in that Metamorphoses is about constant change, and about how this world is in a constant state of flux. In a way it is true; much has changed in the past three hundred years, in fact more apparent change has come upon Western Society in the past three hundred years as opposed to the previous 1000, but even then that is very, very simplistic. It is more that over the past three thousand years change has been very slow, but it has moved exponentially, to a point that in my life time we have seen huge changes in the way we relate and the way we communicate. Three hundred years ago it would take six months in a leaky boat to get from England to Australia, now it takes around two days (depending on the plane you fly). So much has changed, and in a way we see the Metamorphoses happening around us.

I generally don̕t like lyrical prose, but Malouf is certainly a master of it, and so he managed to make it work for me. It̕s especially odd, because it doesn̕t necessarily fit the story: Ovid in exile finding a wild child like one he imagined in his own childhood. One doesn̕t associate Ovid with lyricism, but it̕s the end of his life, and he̕s looking back and ahead, coming to terms. It̕s a truly beautiful novella, just the right length. Everything̕s right about it.

Takes us inside the mind of Ovid who was to spend the last years of his life banished from Rome for supposedly outraging the public with his explicitly erotic literature and poems. ? Unable to communicate with the barbarians he finds himself among he befriends a child who has been brought up by wolves.............He is without speech yet we are privy to his thoughts. Subtle and thought provoking