![]() Go one layer down and this is a tale about metamorphoses, a prose exemplification of fables related to Ovid’s. ![]() On the surface this is about Cotta, a friend and admirer of the banished Roman poet Ovid, who makes a pilgrimage to the town of Tomi in an unsuccessful search for the poet who wrote the Metamorphoses. ![]() The questions must be asked about Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World, which has as many levels as a layer cake. What is it really about, and why was it written like this? The questions are never unreasonable when confronted with works that suggest the possibility of other meanings present beneath the surface level of realism, and when a reader has to decide whether suggested profundities really exist or in fact resemble what Eliot in old age called his notes to The Waste Land, an exhibition of bogus scholarship. ![]()
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