The Last World

Venezianische Garten legen Phosphorbrände an die Fluchtwege der Katakomben, eine Stimme am Telefon spricht vom Zorn des Imperators, und Ovid, der unglücklichste Dichter der Antike, tritt zur Eröffnung eines Stadions vor einen Strauß Mikrophone und Bürger von Rom...Die letzte Welt hat ihren Ursprung im Feuer. Es ist eigentlich nur ein Zimmerbrand, der die Schreibstube einer römischen Villa verwüstet. Was dieses Feuer unvergeßlich macht, ist der Umstand, dass es von Ovid entfacht was da brennt, ist sein Hauptwerk, die Metamorphosen, eine grausame Enzyklopädie der antiken Verwandlungsmythen.Die letzte Welt ist ein utopischer Roman, in dem die Antike auf bedrohliche Weise mit einer unbekannten Zukunft zusammenschießt.

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

Christoph Ransmayr was born in Wels, Austria, in 1954. He is the author of The Last World and The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, both of which have been published to international critical acclaim.