Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is an imaginary life of Ovid, who was exiled from imperial Rome to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. And once there he encounters a wild boy who has no language. So you’ve got this highly attuned language person, Ovid, and this wild boy with no language. And it is about the communication between them, as Ovid gradually strips away his old identity.
We are now off to somewhere completely different with An Imaginary Life by David Malouf.
This is an imaginary life of the poet Ovid, who was exiled from imperial Rome to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. And once there he encounters a wild boy who has no language. So you’ve got this highly attuned language person, Ovid, and this wild boy with no language. And it is about the communication between them, as Ovid gradually sheds his old identity and experiences the world in a new way.
And how do they manage to communicate?
Well, they do it through the body, in looks and movements and by sharing the simple rituals of daily life, as they find a new language of mutual understanding.
And what makes this one a classic for you?
What is interesting about it is that it seems to be a metaphor for Australia. This wordless, maybe innocent, maybe not so innocent space. And what Malouf does is interesting because he turns the commonplaces of this ordinary inarticulate Australianness into a philosophical meditation.
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Nicholas Jose has published short stories, essays, several acclaimed novels, and a memoir. He is Chair in Writing at the University of Western Sydney and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University for 2009-2010. He is general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature which is published internationally as The Literature of Australia. ‘You get this weird thing in Australia,’ he says. ‘It’s a highly urban place and yet the imagination of the writers so often goes to remote places and remote times. The landscape is so vast and unwritten that it is appealing to writers and I think that is something distinctive to Australia.’
