An Imaginary Life
David Malouf
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0679767932
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.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 cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.
"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review
place towards midday. The trees are already bare for the most part, their silvery trunks slashed with black, the last golden leaves caught in a broomstick of twigs, and the earth under our hooves sighing and sifting with the drifts of those that have already been shaken down. The sun is watery, the sky pale, the day windless. Almost unnaturally still. One of the young men dismounts and leads his horse, stooping to examine the earth, where it is visible, for tracks. We all climb down and walk
watches. And I begin to believe that something I will have to call his mind has been engaged, and has started to move out into the room. I feel it. It is there after all. It is there. Some process of reaching up out of himself has begun of its own accord. Today, while I was washing him, he laid his fingertips, with a kind of timid curiosity, on the back of my hand, feeling the texture of the skin – then drew back quickly, as if I might object and punish him. The effect was odd and a little
organs. He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man. Speech is the essential. I have hit at the very beginning on the one thing that will reveal to him of what kind he is. In making those buzzing sounds he discovers his throat. In intoning through his nostrils he realizes that he has a nose, and behind it, caverns where the sound reverberates. And so on for lips, tongue, teeth. As he builds up the whole range
point of infection was that moment when the old woman reached out her hand to touch the young woman, as she started away in terror at the Child’s speaking, and turned with a cry towards the sleepy child behind her. In this first shock at the old woman’s scream, he took the disease, his body opened to receive it from her hands, through his mother’s from the Child. Out of their mind into his. Though what the old woman believes, and has impressed upon the younger, is that the Child’s spirit has
waiting to be crossed, and patient year after year for my arrival. However many steps I may have taken away from it, both in reality and in my mind, it remained, shifting its tides, freezing each season, cracking up, flowing again, whispering to me: I am the border beyond which you must go if you are to find your true life, your true death at last. Comfortably asleep in my little trundle bed at Sulmo, the spoiled second son of a rich landowner, how could I ever have guessed it? What had I to do