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.Īlready 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.

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. 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. 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. 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 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.

The last world christoph ransmayr