The fictional story of Ovid after his banishment from Rome. Descriptive writing but wouldn't rush back. ( )

The imagined life of Ovid suffering banishment to the edge of the Black Sea. Reading this book during a time when there is war going on in the area near the place Ovid was banished so many centuries ago seems almost surreal. ( )

Poetic retelling of Ovid's banishment and his connection with the natural environment through a mystical wild boy. ( )

This book is absolutely sublime. ( )

I don't know what I was expecting, but this is quite unusual. It starts out with the poet Ovid, having been exiled from Rome to the edge of the known world finding himself an unwilling guest of a people who don't speak the same language and who exist in a very different environment to that which he is used to. In chapter 1 he is full of self doubt and there is a cry from the heart of the poet asking if any of his work will survive him, if any of his lines will exist, even if in the quotations of others. We know that this is the case, hos work wasn't all destroyed and he has survived many centuries.
Thereafter, he perks up a bit and we start to know more about the people he is living with, he starts to learn their language and to understand them, while remaining an outsider. As he begins to participate in the life of the village, so we learn more about them, but that also sparks memories in him of his earlier life, his childhood as the second son, his brother and his early death, the relationship with his father. We never quite find out what prompted his exile.
And, somewhere along the way, he sees a wild boy, a human child living with the animals on the plain. He wonders how the child survives and determines to bring him back to the world of men. However this too brings a memory, when he was a child himself he seems to have had an invisible companion, and he can;t decide if the child is this invisible companion brought to life. It takes several seasons before the village combines to bring the boy in and Ovid takes over his care. The village remain sceptical and the events of the penultimate chapter, again, bring to the fore the doubt as to what this child actually is. Is he human, is he a devil, or might he be something else entirely?
There's something supernatural about the close, when the narration has changed tone entirely from the first, no longer worrying about his writing or reputation, Ovid ventures out on one more journey and finds his place in the universe, while the spirit and physical worlds remain merged in an inseperable whole.
I really had no idea what to expect of this from the brief synopsis, and I'm not sure how you go about describing it. There's something lyrical about the prose, something indefineable about the mingling of the physical and the imagined and something entirely enchanting about the care expressed by two such alien beings. I listened to this and really enjoyed it. ( )