Rating: 
Summary: What Might Have Been
Review: "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:
Summary: What Might Have Been
Review: "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: 
Summary: "Brilliant short novel about civilization"
Review: A brilliant short novel about civilization and it's relative disadvantages. It is ostensibly about the poet Ovid's exile from Rome in the fist century A.D. and his developing relationship weather feral child on the outskirts of the empire: Civilization vs. Nature. The importance of language in the novel is questioned, makes a good departure for a book group that will discuss the impact of words. We used Malouf's flowing novel to launch our book club, and the discussion touched on various topics such as Ovid, religion, Roman history.
Rating:
Summary: Unexpectedly gripping, involving.
Review: David Malouf, the talented Australian author of this novel, often writes of cultural conflict or misunderstanding, and he never fails to convey the tensions felt by his protagonists as they grapple with the demons they face. I probably should have had more faith when I began this novel, but the plot line is so bizarre that I couldn't imagine becoming involved with these characters. Exiled to a remote part of Asia Minor where he knows no one, does not understand the culture, and does not speak the language, the Roman poet Ovid, after failing to become an integral part of his new community, makes contact with a wild child who has been living with wolves, the only being more isolated than he. As the unlikely pair begins to communicate, the author's themes of identity, value, and truth take shape and lead to an inevitable conclusion. Ultimately, I did begin to identify with Ovid and to share the feelings of the wolf child, a tribute to the awesome ability of this author to create new worlds.
Rating:
Summary: Fully Human!
Review: Excellent tale, seeking to define qualities that make one human. Social graces, intelligence, superstition, one with nature. And who better to question the concept but an outstanding poet, whom we know of two millenia after his death. Who was fully human, the boy or the poet, or the villagers? Give me the poet any day.
Rating:
Summary: Back to Nature, B.C. style
Review: Ovid, maybe the greatest Roman poet of the Augustan period, was famous not only for his "Metamorphoses" but also his works on the art of love. It was these works which dragged him into scandal and censorship of his works. Yes, as long as there has been authority, authority has been afraid of rebels. For his scandalous works and perhaps for some political reasons Ovid was exiled to the ends of the empire, the equivalent of Siberia to the Romans. He would live out the rest of his days away from everything and everyone he had ever known. This work tries to chronicle his thoughts and actions in those last years in the village of Tomia on the Black Sea. Ovid only has the memories of his past to give him consolation in his loneliness. In particular, he has memories of encounters with a wild boy raised by wolves that he last saw as a young boy. During a hunt with the villagers he sees what he believes to be this very same wild boy. He convinces the village headman to capture the boy and Ovid sets about trying to civilize the Child into what he believes to be humanity. Ironically, it is Ovid who finds himself being educated. This is a short and beautiful book. Its transcendent message of casting off the past and finding your destiny is one very relevant to our age. We have lost touch with primal nature.
Rating:
Summary: Malouf metamorphoses Ovid's last days into flawless art
Review: Reviewers are too loose with the praise, "You've never read a book like this one!" But you have not, indeed, ever reada 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:
Summary: Of shapes transformde to bodies strange
Review: The title of this review is from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It has been quite some time since I read of Hercules, Pygmalion, Thisbe, and a host of others. I do not believe the original Ovid must be read to enjoy Mr. David Malouf's book, but it certainly add to the experience. The irony is Ovid's work is probably four or five times the length, and even a greater consumer of time. A general grasp of what he wrote will suffice. The book also can be read with no reference material, and perhaps that is as the Author intended, each reader will have to decide. In his work, "An Imaginary Life", the Author takes you to an Ovid in exile. His Emperor has sent him away to a place he knows nothing of, amongst a people as different from he as perhaps can be imagined, and without the ability to communicate at all. Time facilitates the learning of language, and the differences that first are so extreme between Ovid and his fellow inhabitants moderate if they do not disappear. The catalyst for much of the effort to learn is a "creature" that also is present among Ovid and his neighbors. This is what I believe to be the "shape transformde" in Mr. Malouf's tale. Many are changed when the story is complete, perhaps most importantly Ovid. Mr. Malouf makes many points about nature, the definition of what it is to be human, and human relations. However for me this was not the most fascinating event while reading. The Author places Ovid in the midst of a situation where everything is unknown to him. Perhaps the most dramatic unknown is a young child that lives among the Deer that he is said to have grown up amongst. When Ovid becomes aware of the child, he desires to capture the boy. His experiences with his plan, his preconceptions, and the very different views of those he hunts the Child with, are fascinating, and wonderfully original. Some may argue that since this work flows as a result of the writings of one of History's great poets the work by definition cannot be unique, only derivative. And such a point is well taken. But to label this work derivative is to do the Author an injustice. He has taken a man who has greatly influenced literature, and in a manner of speaking dropped Ovid into an environment where Ovid is no longer the creator, the narrator, he is the subject. He is the subject not only of his ideas, and preconceptions, he is subject to them as well. Mr. Malouf places Ovid in an environment and with players that contain what Ovid so often wrote of. In this book he being subjected to the experience, not creating it, and Mr. Malouf pays tribute to the man by the quality of what he has created. Again the more of Ovid you bring with you, the deeper you will be able to involve yourself in the Author's purpose. I was forced to go back and refresh my memory, and because I did, I do not believe I experienced all the Author intended. If you read this after Ovid's own work, I believe the experience will be even better.
Rating:
Summary: 4.5 Stars - Highly Recommended
Review: This book covers many themes, such as the relationship between civilization and nature, which ties into a conflict between wildness and cultivation. The author presents various important and intriguing topics, but overall I found his investigation into language the most beautiful and interesting element. We discussed this book in my Great Books Discussion Group and there were different interpretations. What I found to be central was the idea that all languages are tied together and share a similar core, but beyond the different languages, there is a universal language. This universal language is not really a language as we know it. To define it would be difficult, but it is something like a silent language, the language of nature, or a symbolic language. Ovid's growth, which occurs once he leaves civilization, is completely tied to his realization of this primal language. I found the novel disturbing at times, but ultimately a very poetic and spiritual creation.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: 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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