The Last World

A traveller from Rome arrives in a small port on the Black Sea coast, in search of the great poet Naso, who has been exiled there by the Emperor, and is now rumoured to have died. But this isn't Augustan Rome as we know it - or at least not unless Roman historians were keeping very quiet about things like bus stops, P.A. systems and cinema projectors. And there seems to be something oddly familiar about the names and stories of the butcher Tereus and his wife Procne, the carpet-weaver Arachne, the shopkeeper Fama, the ropemaker Lycaon, and the rest of the local inhabitants. Could it be that Naso's great lost book has embedded itself into the structure of the world itself?

A clever, interesting, and rather strange book, but a satisfying show more and thought-provoking (even prescient) one as well. Lots to reflect on about the power of great narrative and the problems of climate-change, populism, authoritarian government, anarchy, refugees, etc. And a very useful reference section at the back for those who can't keep track of every single character in Ovid and what happened to them. show less

Ovid has been banished from Rome. Rome during Augustus' reign, with its pompous displays, useless luxuries, and endless public rituals, has no room for a skeptic, a subtle, polished poet. Ovid has become one of the
" untrustworthy" and has been removed to Tomi, a remote port on the Black Sea......

Many years later, rumors of Ovid's death reach Rome. An admirer of Ovid, a young man named Cotta, who is bored with his pointless , empty life, decides, on a whim and not realizing that he would be labelled a "fugitive of the state", to go to Ovid's place of exile and find the poet's final work.
But the isolated Tomi is more than Cotta first realized, for it is here that the ancient and modern worlds intersect and Ovid's METAMORPHOSES comes to show more life; a place where the village idiot turns into stone, a beautiful woman named Echo vanishes, leaving only her voice behind, it is here that a traveling projectionist " could hitch human destinies to his machine and transpose them whirring into the bustling world, into life"....

A novel about exile, censorship, reactionary politics, and the destruction/recreation of the world. THE LAST WORLD is a masterpiece. show less

I very much enjoyed Christoph Ransmayr's novel" The Last World: A novel with an Ovidian Repeatory." The language alone is just so spot-on beautiful -- and the story itself is simple, but with so many layers, built on the theme of transformation. It's a lovely work.

The story centers on Cotta, who travels to the Black Sea on the hunt for Ovid (called Naso here) after he was banished from Rome for insulting the emperor. Cotta is hoping to find a copy of "Metamorphoses," believing Ovid burned it before being exiled.

The book is populated by many characters from "Metamorphoses" who are transformed into something not quite the same as they were in the original work. Ransmayr paints lovely images and scenes that I think will stick with me for a show more long time. This is definitely one of those books that begs to be reread for all of the threads that were missed the first time -- and I will have no trouble revisiting this one in the future. show less

Nothing retains its form…

Austrian novelist Christoph Ransmayr is the recipient of at least a dozen European literary awards (including the prestigious Franz Kafka prize in ‘95) as well as holding an Elias Canneti Fellowship. I only picked up his third novel, The Last World, as a follow up to my recent delving into Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as I had otherwise no intention of straying from my reading strictly older classic literature in an effort to ‘fill in the gaps’ of my reading background. I had long wanted to read a Ransmayr work, and understood this particular novel was premised on the roman poet’s epic that was still fresh in my memory…

In my humble yet over privileged opinion, to appreciate the other five or so levels show more beyond the storyline, a first time reader should NOT read this without having read and have at least a basic understanding of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The work is widely influential, as Shakepeare, Chaucer and Dante just to name a few made references to it in their works. Ransmayr (or his publisher) has provided an ‘Ovidian Repertory’ in the back of the novel which is helpful to reference the novel’s characters within the frame of the Ur text, but that said, the main mechanisms and structures of the novel are a subtext and they form the sometimes ironic, and often elegiac interplay against its backdrop. The overarching irony of the novel is so big, its easily missed.

On the plot level it’s a literary detective tale, as the protagonist Cotta, ostensibly attempts to follow the leads to track the banished Roman Poet Ovid to his exiled home on Tomis (modern day Romania on the Black Sea) where he has disappeared. The reader soon realizes that the novel’s Roman Empire is not set in the beginning of the first millennium. The historical identifiers are few, just enough to unmoor the reader’s (and the story’s) place in time. In Ransmayr’s text Ovid manages to burn the manuscript of his epic work upon learning that Augustus issued a decree to banished him, before the public had ever read it.

On the basic narrative level the story is immediately captivating. In the John Woods translation the prose is to savor and read aloud. As in Ovid’s text, Ransmayr makes extensive use throughout of the rhetorical device of ekphrasis in an attempt to dramatically reveal and define an objects essence through overlaying different mediums. The fictive present is a vague foreground against the backdrop of the ancient past. The resulting sense of historical depth of perspective is enigmatic and lends to the sense of dislocation.

The text itself is a form of metamorphosis, or transformation. The many transformations of human characters into animals or stone in Ovid’s epic are largely in the form of punishment as deemed fit by the capricious Roman gods. In the novel’s world, the gods are nowhere to be found, except in the form of grotesques. Ovid’s work of linked mini-epics and tales were all well known to his audience of the time, they understood his many ironic twists and adapted versions of the stories of gods whimsically toying with humankind’s heroic figures. In The Last World, the characters and their stories from the Metamorphoses exist in the quotidian level of Tomi, yet ironically they have no context, they are totally deprived of mythic proportions. Tireseas is the local butcher for example, and he is (as in Ovid’s work) married to Procne. His being a butcher is a pun on the Pythagorus section near the end of the Metamorphosis where he elucidates why the eating animal flesh is metaphysically wrong – messes up reincarnation and is equated with basic greed…

As the tale unfolds the mystery of Nasso’s (derived from the poet’s middle name) disappearance, the readers as well as the protagonist Cotta’s sense of alienation and isolation grows and builds. Cotta’s search for Nasso becomes a quest also for his own identity and its place in ‘his story’. His displacement in this world is as a much a form of exile as the poets. The world of this exile is never stable, it is in a state of constant flux and chaos: nature has gone amok, and somehow the normal cycle of seasons have accelerated and are out of balance. The inhabitants we learn later are all exiles, and are at the mercy of the constant upheaval of the four elements: Air, Earth, Fire and Water. These are symptomatic of the transformations that are taking place in the storyworld.The cycle is not an eternal one however, this is not just another phase in and endless chain, this is indeed, the Last World, the age of Iron as the last age of the Four Ages of Man as listed in the first book of Ovid’s work. The town of Tomi in the novel is always referred to as “the city of Iron”.

Since paradise ( the“golden age of man”) has been irrecoverably lost in time and the place, the question becomes can it at least be held in the imagination, through the herculean efforts of the artist. Can the names in a reality recorded create a context for the exile, a last refuge that is livable, a The Last World?

There is a prophetic and haunting scene early in book 2 where Cotta is led by Pythagorus through the remote ruins of the poets last stand in the mountain heights of Trachila and by candlelight finds the epilogue from The Metamorphoses, hidden under a living carpet of slugs:

I HAVE COMPLETED A WORK
THAT WILL WITHSTAND FIRE
AND IRON
EVEN THE WRATH OF GOD
AND ALL CONSUMING TIME

WHENEVER IT WILL
LET DEATH NOW COME
HAVING ONLY MY BODY
WITHIN ITS POWER
AND END MY LIFE

BUT THROUGH THIS WORK
I WILL LIVE ON AND
LIFT MYSELF HIGH ABOVE THE STARS
AND MY NAME
WILL BE INDESTRUCTIBLE

There is no question Publius Ovidius Naso’s epic monument succeded, while
Ransmayr’s Last World may last a good while in its shadow show less

I am not sure if there is anybody alive, who can handle the German language better than Ransmayr does it in this book. Every sentence is perfect and stands on its own. It is pure excitement to read this book.

The book tells the story of the quest for Ovid, the author of Metamorphosis. The main character (Cotta) strands in a strange country, in which Ovids figures - the gods and heroes of his writings - are alive.

Be prepared - this is not a dreamy return to the legends of the ancient age. "The Last World" uncovers the tragic and the sadness of the old legends and throws the protagonist (as well as the reader) right back to the main subject: himself.

Þessi saga hefur verið lofuð í hástert en átti því miður ekki upp á pallborðið hjá mér. Segir frá leit ungs manns að skáldinu Óvíð. Sögusviðið er við Svartahaf en Rómaveldi er enn við lýði á 20. öld. Vegna ritskoðunar hefur Óvíð verið hrakinn í útlegð. Nöturlegur heimur og annarlegur og fyrir bregður reglulega persónum úr goðsögulegum og bókmenntalegum sögnum. Þetta er eiginlega saga sem þarf að lesa oftar en einu sinni og melta vel en hafði bara ekki þolinmæði né nennu til þess.

An Admirer of Ovid travels to Constanza, a lonely spot at the Black Sea, where the Roman Poet had been banned to. Ransmayr with his oeuvre in a wonderful poetic language should be a candidate for the Nobel prize