A Roman stranger comes to the town of Tomi on the coast of the Black Sea in search of the poet Ovid, who was exiled there by the runaway bureaucracy of an oppressive Roman Empire. What he finds instead is fantasy turned reality, bizarreness, and mysteries. Ransmayr takes parts of Ovid’s life story and elements of his most famous work, the Metamorphoses, and crafts them into something new: he adapts the tales, the protagonists and really the whole environment to fit a new narrative.
When I read the summary of the book I was immediately intrigued, because in theory it sounded amazing. Greek and Roman myths, Ovid’s works, ancient history, what could go wrong? Sadly, as it turns out, a lot. His interpretations of the original myths add absolutely nothing to the happenings or the characters; quite the contrary, I thought they became flat and one-dimensional. In fact, there is an addendum of roughly 30 pages that explains the characters and their fates as written by Ovid and juxtaposes them with Ransmayr’s incarnations. I disliked this immensely, because to me it seemed that if he had fleshed out his protagonists sufficiently, readers would not need any further background information on them. If it is only meant to highlight the differences, then in direct comparison his take on them felt even more uninspired.
Additionally, his overbearing and self-indulgent prose which strives for poetic but all too often veers into overblown sometimes made me struggle to even pay attention to his characters and their doings. On the other hand, however, I liked the overall mood of the book, as it has a dreamlike quality that often tilts into the nightmarish which I thought very fitting and well done.
What also does work well is the backstory of Ovid. The flashback to his rise to fame and his eventual banishment were the most interesting part to me. There is a scene in which he gives a speech in front of Emperor Augustus and a huge crowd that is simply brilliantly done, and the commentary on the state of the Roman Empire, its politics and its ruler is firm and biting. The muzzling of artists by a tyrannical regime and the handling of their rebelliousness, for instance by exiling them, is surely a theme here, but it gets a little lost in the clutter.
The wasted potential is what really galls me, because I can see what Ransmayr was going for and I think the underlying idea is great, but the execution is sorely lacking. In a book working with such fantastic source material it is disappointing and rather unfathomable that the realistic and political parts are effective and the mythical and poetic ones are not.