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David Malouf
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An Imaginary Life Paperback – 5 February 1999

by David Malouf (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 159
Edition: 1st
See all formats and editions
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'A brilliantly inventive novel... Malouf puts on a dazzling literary display in this arresting, original, lyrical work' Wall Street Journal

In the first century AD, Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverant poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction.

Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impate their dead and converse with the spirit world. But then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once catalogued the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0099273845
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0099273844
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
  5. Publication date
    5 February 1999
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    12.9 x 1.1 x 19.8 cm
  8. Print length
    176 pages
  9. See all details
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A work of unusual intelligence and imagination...[a sort of] fantasia on what Ovid's life in exile might have been and, as time went by, became, as the quintessentially civilized man of letters was forced to come to terms with a harsh, pre-rational, thoroughly alien world -- Katha Pollitt ― New York Times

Elegant and resonant narrative...an exhilarating use of language ― Sunday Telegraph

Haunting ― Sunday Telegraph

David Malouf, a spare and delicate writer, presents here the first-person story of the Roman poet Ovid's exile in the distant, frosty wastes...hypnotic in its gripping accumulation of detail, its gradual unwrapping of human reality amid what at first seems a barbarian and unknowable environment. At the centre of this meticulously well-told tale is Ovid's encounter with a wild boy, brought up among the deer in the snow ― Sunday Times

About the Author

David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, His most recent, Ransom, published in 2010, and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award, and his recent story collections are Dream Stuff ('These stories are pearls' Spectator) and Every Move You Make ('Rare and luminous talent' Guardian). In 2008 Malouf was the Scottish Arts' Council Muriel Spark International Fellow. Born in 1934 in Brisbane, where he was brought up, he lives in Sydney.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET; 1st edition (5 February 1999)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 176 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0099273845
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099273844
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 1.1 x 19.8 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 159

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David Malouf

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4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
159 global ratings

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Top reviews from Australia

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great service.
Reviewed in Australia on 3 January 2021
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Arrived on time in perfect condition.
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LuvKindle
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent read/listen.
Reviewed in Australia on 20 November 2020
Superb narration. A wonderful lyrical novel. Absolutely entranced.
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PattyMacDotComma
5.0 out of 5 stars Memorable and poetic storytelling.
Reviewed in Australia on 15 June 2021
5★
“The child is there. I am three or four years old. It is late summer. It is spring. I am six. I am eight. The child is always the same age. We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising. My brother, who is a year older, does not see him, even when he moves close between us.”

This is an imagined life of the Roman poet Ovid, who was banished by Emperor Augustus to a village unlike anything he’d known.

“I am describing a state of mind, no place. I am in exile here. The village called Tomis consists of a hundred huts made of woven branches and mud, with roofs of thatch and floors of beaten mud covered with rushes.”

For man with a love of words, this is severe punishment indeed. Nobody understands him, and he understands nobody.

“But they are, even so, of our species, these Getae. I listen to them talk. The sounds are barbarous, and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken, even pronouncements of exile.”

As a boy, he had an imaginary friend, a boy, the child referred to in the opening quotation.

“When I first saw the child I cannot say. I see myself — I might be three or four years old — playing under the olives at the edge of our farm, just within call of the goatherd, and I am talking to the child, whether for the first time or not I cannot tell at this distance.”

When the villagers take him along on a hunt, he thinks he sees the boy of his imagination. His memories and his dreams and his very different life change him. He waits anxiously for the next hunting season so he can search for the elusive boy.

Ovid writes this as if it were a letter. Whether anyone ever reads it or not doesn’t matter. He must write. It’s what he does.

“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?”

Yes. For a couple of thousand years, in fact.

Gradually, Ovid comes to appreciate and respect the old people who keep the customs and traditions alive and who are kind to him while being very suspicious of his strangeness.

This is wonderful storytelling, like a poetic saga you might hear told at night by a fire. There are herbs and potions, fevers, a shaman, and the stuff of dreams or nightmares. Not a long book, but certainly a memorable one.
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HB
5.0 out of 5 stars Poétique
Reviewed in France on 5 November 2021
Verified Purchase
J’ai lu ce livre il y a quelques années, je le redécouvre aujourd’hui.
A lire et à relire
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John Lawless
5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2017
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This is a tour de force. I loved this book. For me it operated on so many different levels, historical novel about the last days of Ovid, allegorical treatise on the issue of the treatment of Australian aborigines, man coming to terms with his old age, man’s search for transcendence etc. etc. I have no doubt but that other readers found many more meanings and themes. Above all, it’s the literary style which just blew me away. Each line has to be savoured and turned over a few times to get its myriad meanings. The style is tight and controlled but it’s not just an imaginary life, it’s a true flight of the imagination. Read it.
2 people found this helpful
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Ayelen D'Odorico
5.0 out of 5 stars an imaginary life
Reviewed in Italy on 1 December 2013
Verified Purchase
é stato consegnato subito ed è arrivato in ottime condizioni. Libro molto interessante e utile per letteratura dell'area di lingua inglese.
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C. Collins
5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic short novel written beautifully
Reviewed in the United States on 28 April 2012
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This poetic short novel is extremely moving for Malouf uses the language of perception, sensation and intuition to great effect. This novel is based on the exile of the great Roman poet and writer, Ovid, exiled to the northern boundaries of the Roman Empire by the Emperor Nero. In a distant, barren, primitive tribal village he resides with a family. Yet, in beautiful paradox, it is the years he spends in exile that begin to shape Ovid's spirit and reconcile him to a return to nature at his death. It is a novel about the separation of mankind from nature. This separation of man from nature because of our cognitive abilities is considered to be tragic by such great writers as Melville. Malouf, to his great credit, understands that the return to nature is to dissolve the ego into ephemeral sensation experiences. This may sound too philosophical but Malouf pulls it off with a short book full of vivid descriptions and tensions. Several of these passages warrant comment. Ovid has never reconciled that his devoted and honored older brother died at age 18 leaving Ovid, the dreamer, as the heir. Such a burden to know that you are not the favored son and now you must replace the favored son and also to be burdened with guilt that any thoughts of the future beyond his brother's death would hasten that death.

The passages of nature descriptions and dreams are very beautiful and I realize deserve a slow second reading. One dream stands out where Ovid is a rain puddle, moved by the passing sky and clouds and sun as the human soul is moved by emotions and pain. That as dark clouds reflect upon his surface, the puddle cools, as the life energy of man cools and flairs with life events and time.

Ovid is enchanted by a wild child of 8 who lives with the deer in the forest and after 3 years of gradual contact he is captured and brought into the superstitious village. The villagers are correct to view him with suspicion for he surely was protected by the gods and spirits of the wild to survive 11 years naked in the cold harsh wild world.

The passages where the Child becomes ill and the perceptions of this illness by the family where Ovid lives and the other villagers is fascinating. For what is contagion in the primitive mind exception possession of evil spirits moving from one body to the next.

I was reminded of the poetry of Yeats and Ted Hughes and the novels of Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians) and the short story by James Joyce (The Dead) as I read Malouf, yet he is not derivative but deals with themes that Joyce, Coetzee, Hughes, and Yeats also explore.

What do you want to understand before you die? What do you wish to experience before you die? What is the unreconciled part of you that should be made whole before your last breath? Malouf is brave enough to engage in a short novel that addresses these issues with dream, vision, and the power of sensation. An excellent book which I highly recommend.
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Lynda D. Zweben-howland
4.0 out of 5 stars Sensitive, imaginative.
Reviewed in the United States on 29 March 2015
Verified Purchase
This is a beautifully written imaginatively crafted narrative of an important and fascinating character in literary history. I think it would of more interest to students of classical antiquity than the average fiction reader.
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