Die letzte Welt

When Christoph Ransmayr's novel "The Last World" was published in 1988, it was celebrated by critics like few others - for its poetic, rhythmic language, its stylistic elegance, and also for its powerful dream and nightmare imagery. In this novel, the banishment of the Roman poet Ovid by Emperor Augustus in 8 AD serves as the historically fixed starting point of an imaginative fiction. The Roman Cotta, Ovid's historically documented friend through Ovid's "Letters from Exile," embarks on a search in Tomi by the Black Sea: for the banished poet, as rumors of his death circulate in Rome, and for a copy of the "Metamorphoses," Ovid's legendary masterpiece. However, in the "iron gray city" of Tomi, Cotta only finds traces of his friend; he does not encounter Ovid himself. He discovers Ovid's dilapidated house in the mountains, the aged servant Pythagoras, and, as the search becomes increasingly complicated and hopeless, ever more enigmatic signs of the "Metamorphoses" - in images, figures, and wondrous events. Until, in the end, Cotta himself seems to lose himself in the mysteriously unreal world of transformations: the dissolution of this "last world" has once again become literature.