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Title: An Imaginary Life: A Novel by David Malouf ISBN: 0-679-76793-2 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 June, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.77 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Malouf metamorphoses Ovid's last days into flawless art
Comment: Reviewers are too loose with the praise, "You've never read a book like this one!" But you have not, indeed, ever read
a book like David Malouf's An Imaginary Life. He gives us the great Latin poet Ovid in a barbaric village on the shores of the Black Sea,
exiled from Rome for offending the emperor Augustus. And here he mets a strange boy, a boy who seems to have never had any human contact
before. Ovid "captures" the boy and begins to "humanize" him, but this is only the beginning of the tale, because the wild boy has something to teach Ovid
as well. By no means a typical tale of "civilized man" meeting "feral child" or "noble savage," An Immaginary Life shows
us Ovid, the poet of amoral seduction, learning to love like a father and to find, in his primitive surroundings, a form
of life he could never have discovered in sophisticated and decadent Rome. In other hands, the story might have been "mere"
fantasy or science fiction. In poet Malouf's hands, however, An Imaginary Life is a new Odyssey, but one in which the destination
is not the much-longed-for home, but an entrance into another world.
Rating: 5
Summary: What Might Have Been
Comment: "An Imaginary Life" is one of the most mesmerizing books I've ever read and it's certainly the most poetic and beautiful. There isn't much of a plot in this book nor is it a character study. To me, it's more akin to a long prose poem (and Malouf is also a poet as well as a novelist), though it really isn't a prose poem, either. "An Imaginary Life" is a poetic flight of fancy, an impossibly beautiful reverie and a dazzling story of "what might have been yet could never be."
Most of the events this book relates are, of course, imagined. We know that Ovid was exiled and we know to where, but about what happened during that exile, we know nothing, not even the date or exact place of Ovid's death.
Malouf has used this absence of known facts regrding Ovid's exile to weave a gorgeously ephemeral portrait of a man and a boy who, together, find the wellspring of both humanity and love, something neither could have done alone, despite Ovid's reputation in Rome.
While the storyline of "An Imaginary Life" isn't particularly mesmerizing on its own, Malouf's lush, poetic prose makes it so. This is a short book, really more of a novella than a novel and I can't imagine anyone not reading it in one sitting. One sentence simply flows into the next and I was riveted from the first page to the last.
Highly recommended to anyone.
Rating: 5
Summary: Amazing
Comment: This is an extraordinary, fascinating, and deeply moving book. Malouf brilliantly takes Ovid's exile to the furthest outpost of the Roman empire and makes of it a beautifully written, beautifully executed meditation on imagination and "what it is to be human." It is a strangely liberating book, for, to quote the text, "We are free to transcend ourselves. If we have the imagination for it."
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Title: Middlemarch (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton ISBN: 0141439548 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: Remembering Babylon (Vintage International) by David Malouf ISBN: 0679749519 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 October, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Love-Artist (Bestselling Backlist) by Jane Alison ISBN: 0312420064 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Riders in the Chariot (New York Review Books Classics) by Patrick White, David Malouf ISBN: 1590170024 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Dream Stuff: Stories (Vintage International (Paperback)) by David Malouf ISBN: 0375724494 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 11 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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