It is inhabited by people who come straight from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – people who turn to stone or into animals, who are linked to their wild and unfriendly landscape, who act out ancient rites (into which Cotta is dragged).

Tomis is an iron-mining town and much of the area is built of (rusting) iron. It is about the merging of the myths of Ovid’s time and our time. Most of the book – apart from a few flashbacks – is in Tomis, which is, as the title has it, the last world.īut the book is really about much more. In real life, this poetry collection survived but, in Ransmayr’s book, Ovid burned the only copy when he was exiled. According to the story, Cotta sets out to find Ovid, not only to determine if he is still alive (he seems to have disappeared into the mountains around Tomis – in real life he died there but his grave is unknown) but also to find a copy of his legendary Metamorphoses. Ovid was exiled to Tomis, a remote province on the Black Sea (now in Romania), where he died.

The basic story is about the Roman poet Ovid or, rather, the search for him. While he is quite right, it’s a bit like saying that Ulysses is about a walking tour around Dublin. The blurb on the back of my copy of the book quotes Salman Rushdie saying that the theme of this book is that you can destroy the artist but not his art. Home » Austria » Christoph Ransmayr » Letzte Welt (The Last World) Christoph Ransmayr: Letzte Welt (The Last World)

The last world christoph ransmayr