"An Imaginary Life" is one of the most mesmerizing books Ive ever read and its certainly the most poetic and beautiful. There isnt much of a plot in this book nor is it a character study. To me, its more akin to a long prose poem (and Malouf is also a poet as well as a novelist), though it really isnt 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 Ovids death. Malouf has used this absence of known facts regrding Ovids 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 Ovids reputation in Rome. While the storyline of "An Imaginary Life" isnt particularly mesmerizing on its own, Maloufs lush, poetic prose makes it so. This is a short book, really more of a novella than a novel and I cant 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.
Reviewers are too loose with the praise, "Youve never read a book like this one!" But you have not, indeed, ever read a book like David Maloufs 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 Maloufs 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.
This is an extraordinary, fascinating, and deeply moving book. Malouf brilliantly takes Ovids 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."
