An Imaginary Life (Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: David Malouf
- First Published: 1978
- Type of Work: Historical romance
- Time of Work: Approximately 8 to 18
- Setting: Tomis, an outpost of the Roman Empire, between the Danube and the Black Sea
- Principal Characters: Ovid, The Child, Ryzak, His Mother, His Daughter-in-Law, Lullo
- Genres: Long fiction, Historical fiction
- Subjects: Love or romance, Nature, Exile or expatriates, Literature, Art or artists, Poetry or poets, Adoption or adopted children, Greek or Roman times, Biography
- Locales: Roman Empire
The Novel
For reasons which even Ovid seems not to know clearly, the poet, at the height of his career, is exiled from Rome to a small village in the wilds near the Black Sea. Although he is able to continue writing and to correspond with friends and relatives in Rome, he is faced with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in this primitive backwater where the natives, obviously ordered to take care of him, do not even speak Latin, and whose lives are spent working barely to survive. Eight months out of the year, the land is cold, and the village is threatened by...
[The entire page is 2055 words long]
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