Christoph Ransmayr - The Last World (Grove Press, 1990) ***½

The title of "The Last World" describes a dystopian situation, at the outskirts of society, in an unspecified time, a kind of mixture of an early 20th century period (microphones exist) yet coupled with the reign of Emperor Augustus of Rome (65 BC- 14 AD), who banned the famous poet Ovid to Tomis in current-day Romania, because of a "poem and a secret". The poem was the erotic "Ars Amatoria", and the secret was the Ovid had witnessed something that could embarass or undermine the authority of Augustus.

In this novel, a Roman man, called Cotta arrives in Tomi, looking for the exiled poet. It is unclear why he is looking for the poet, and very soon he gets caught up in the lives of the people living in the small seaside town. Most people get affected by some strange events, literally taken from Ovid's own stories in the "Metamorphosis", a book with poems about people who become animals, or plants, or even rocks. 

Ransmayr's story is dark, uneven and dystopian. Many of the joylike and even fun aspects of Ovid's poetry remain totally absent in his worldview. The characters do not really come to life. Cotta's personality remains vague, unpredictable and without any sense of direction. Even if he is in Tomi to look for Ovid, he does not appear to be very persistent. The real protagonist are the people of Tomi collectively, which gives a strange sense of distance, more like a historian narrating the fate of the village than a real literary author describes the emotional depth of individuals in their relationship to each other or the world. 

The people are all like jetsam and flotsam, washed on the shores of the town, with no real lives, perspectives or future plans. 

"... along the coast of Tomi all biographies were alike in one point at least: whoever made a home in the ruins, caves, and weather-beaten stone houses of Tomi had come here as a stranger from somewhere else. With the exception of a few grubby, raggletail kids, there was no one in Tomi who had lived here since birth, no one who had not been tossed up on this coast as a refugee or an exile after a long, roundabout journey. To hear Fama talk, the town of iron was moribund, little more than a camp for transients, for people who landed here at the end of an unhappy chain of events and reversals of fortune and lived here among the ruins as if in a penal colony, until time or chance freed them from this wilderness or they simply vanished, (...) like so many others who had shown up here at some point, camped in the debris for a while, and then disappeared" (p. 195). 

Despite the strong unity of style and voice, the novel lacks gripping moments, or for the reader to be truly dragged into the lives of the characters. It is worth reading, but not the masterpiece that some claim it to be.