Author: Christoph Ransmayr
Translator: Hee-gwon Jang
Publisher: Yeollinchaekdeul
260 pages | 188*120mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
The poet Ovid, in his distress over his banishment from Rome, consigns the
manuscript of his masterpiece, Metamorphoses, to the flames; years later, when
rumors of his death reach Rome, his youthful admirer Cotta follows him to the
remote Black Sea port of Tomi. Out of this story Christoph Ransmayr has
fashioned an astonishing novel about a journey of adventure that has become
Europe's most recent critical and best-selling literary sensation.
The Last World is the story of a quest. As Cotta, following a trail of clues
Ovid has left behind, searches for the exiled poet and his lost work, he
discovers in the rust-corroded town of Tomi an ominous scene suffused with and
dominated by Ovidian mythology, a transformed place where the ancient world
meets the twentieth century. Cotta is lured into a visionary landscape that
impersonates Ovid's vanished poem in which the familiar is forever transmuted in
new and wondrous ways. In this world the village idiot turns to stone, the
ravishingly beautiful whore disappears from the face of the earth, and the
ropemaker takes on the guise of a wolf. These and other singular events furnish
the pieces of a puzzle that Cotta assembles into a dramatic and bewitching
story--a political and cultural fable about the end of time, the last world.
Already acclaimed as a modern masterpiece and currently being translated into
thirty languages, The Last World is destined to become one of the most important
novels of our time. Ransmayr writes with dazzling power and sensuously charged
language about the endlessly shifting flow of time, the lusty cycle of life in
which the carrion of the past forever gives birth to the new. A metaphysical
thriller both compelling and profound, The Last World draws the reader into a
universe governed by the power of mythology, a world of decay on the brink of
apocalypse. A novel about exile, censorship, and the destruction of the
planet-as well as its constant renewal--The Last World is a cultural and
political fable that is blazingly topical, yet timeless.
"A brilliant exercise in alternative literary history...Mr. Ransmayr's book
is all of a piece--intensely visualized, dense with magical images, and offering
many obscure satisfactions."--The New York Times Book Review
"Strange and haunting.... [The novel's] smooth blend of gritty detail and high
fantasy...resembles the magic realism of Garcia Marquez."--The New Republic
"As a parable...it has a vivid and unsettling force."--Los Angeles Times
"Original, unusual, and beautifully written, The Last World is a book of many
pleasures, as shifting and elusive in its meanings as it is vivid and specific
in the images it evokes."--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"An allegory of the effects of a repressive state on the survival of artistic
thought.... The Last World arrives in America flying the banners of European
acclaim; now that it's here, run another couple of flags up poles."--The
Washington Post Book World
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