The poet Ovid, in his distress over his banishment from Rome, consigns
the manuscript of his masterpiece, Metamorphoses, to the flames; years
later, when rumors of his death reach Rome, his youthful admirer Cotta
follows him to the remote Black Sea port of Tomi. Out of this story
Christoph Ransmayr has fashioned an astonishing novel about a journey of
adventure that has become Europe's most recent critical and best-selling
literary sensation.
The Last World is the story of a quest. As Cotta, following a trail of
clues Ovid has left behind, searches for the exiled poet and his lost
work, he discovers in the rust-corroded town of Tomi an ominous scene
suffused with and dominated by Ovidian mythology, a transformed place
where the ancient world meets the twentieth century. Cotta is lured into
a visionary landscape that impersonates Ovid's vanished poem in which
the familiar is forever transmuted in new and wondrous ways. In this
world the village idiot turns to stone, the ravishingly beautiful whore
disappears from the face of the earth, and the ropemaker takes on the
guise of a wolf. These and other singular events furnish the pieces of a
puzzle that Cotta assembles into a dramatic and bewitching story--a
political and cultural fable about the end of time, the last world.
Already acclaimed as a modern masterpiece and currently being translated
into thirty languages, The Last World is destined to become one of the
most important novels of our time. Ransmayr writes with dazzling power
and sensuously charged language about the endlessly shifting flow of
time, the lusty cycle of life in which the carrion of the past forever
gives birth to the new. A metaphysical thriller both compelling and
profound, The Last World draws the reader into a universe governed by
the power of mythology, a world of decay on the brink of apocalypse. A
novel about exile, censorship, and the destruction of the planet--as
well as its constant renewal--The Last World is a cultural and
political fable that is blazingly topical, yet timeless.
