‘Die letzte Welt’ (‘The Last World’) by Christoph Ransmayr (Review)

It’s November, and that can mean only one thing – it’s time for German Literature Month!  While there may be the odd intruder this month, I’ll be doing my best to get to a number of books originally written in German, with reviews of works both old and new.  I’ll hopefully be introducing a few writers I’ve never tried before, but I expect that the bulk of my reading will be returning to authors whose work I’ve previously enjoyed.  That’s certainly the case with my first review of the month.  My first encounter with this writer’s work saw me taking part in an epic journey – things are no different today, but we’re going in a slightly different direction, with a clever twist to the tale.

*****
Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt (The Last World) begins with the end of a journey.  The Roman citizen Cotta staggers off a ship after seventeen days at sea, happy to have arrived, but still struggling to stand up.  His destination is the antique city of Tomi, a rough settlement on the coast of the Black Sea, located in present-day Romania, where various folk from around the Mediterranean find themselves after leaving their homes.

It seems an odd place for someone from Rome to be, but this is no idle outing – Cotta has a very good reason for making his epic journey:

So war dieses Gerücht verwandelt, weiter ausgeschmückt oder abgeschwächt und manchmal sogar widerlegt worden und war doch immer nur der Kokon für einen einzigen Satz geblieben, den es in sich barg wie eine Larve, von der niemand wußte, was aus ihr noch hervorkriechen würde.  Der Satz hieß, Naso ist tot.
p.11 (Fischer Verlag, 2013)

Thus this rumour had been developed, further embellished or weakened, and sometimes even contradicted, and yet had always remained merely the cocoon for a single sentence, which it hid deep inside itself like a larva, from which nobody yet knew what would crawl out.  The sentence was Naso is dead.
*** (my translation)

But who is Naso, you might ask.  Well, if I tell you that he’s better-known as the Roman poet Ovid, you might understand the impetus for Cotta’s travels, especially as before beginning his exile, the poet supposedly burnt the only copy of his legendary Metamorphoses, and Cotta is hoping to track down another copy before anybody else does.

Any classics scholar may have already suspected that this isn’t exactly a piece of accurate historical fiction, and the more you read of Die letzte Welt, the more you’ll find that the factual story of Ovid’s exile to Tomi is just the background to Ransmayr’s story of life at the end of the world.  He uses his visitor from the glittering metropolis to explore life on the edges of the empire, with Cotta spending a year or so in the far-flung settlement, searching for traces of the poet and his work while slowly being absorbed into the town.

Tomi itself is a major character in the story.  Nestled on the coast, facing a sometimes unforgiving sea and with its back to steep mountain ranges, it’s truly a sight to make you wonder about it all:

Dort unten, am Strand, in Tomi! werde das Ende der Welt doch deutlicher sichtbar als in erträumten oder erfundenen Schreckbildern.  In diesen Ruinen, diesen verrauchten, verwilderten Gassen und brachliegenden Feldern, in diesen Dreckslöchern und den Rußgesichtern ihrer Bewohner, in jedem Winkel und Grunzlaut Tomis sei die Zukunft doch bereits hörbar, sichtbar, greifbar.  Wozu Hirngespinste?  Im nächstbesten Jauchetümpel der eisernen Stadt spiegle sich doch die Zukunft bereits, jeder Tümpel ein Fenster in die von der Zeit verwüstete Welt. (p.165)

Down below, on the beach, in Tomi! the end of the world was far clearer to see than in dreamed or invented horror stories.  In these ruins, these smoke-filled, neglected streets and fallow fields, in these muddy holes and the soot-stained faces of its inhabitants, in every corner and grunt in Tomi, the future could already be heard, seen, touched.  Why the need for fantasies?  In any cesspit of the iron city, a reflection of the future could already be seen, every one of them a window into a world devasted by time. ***

While life is possible there because of the iron ore and coal that can be dug up, it’s still a miserable town that survives on trade with occasional visitors from the sea.  Tomi is mainly populated by strangers who have landed here and never managed to get out, each new arrival finding an abandoned house to shelter them and using their talents to create a niche for themselves in society.

It’s certainly an interesting place for a famous poet to end up, then…  Part of the story, and the focus of the first half, is Cotta’s search for Naso as he seeks to learn the truth behind the rumours of the poet’s demise.  He makes the trek up the mountains to Trachila, where the great man is said to have made his home, finding only his companion, Pythagoras, who shows him stones with Naso’s words carved in them, and speaks of Naso’s long expeditions around the mountains.

The name Pythagoras might ring a few bells, and it’s far from the only one.  In fact, Cotta (himself a historical figure) gradually makes the acquaintance of a number of Tomi’s leading lights, many of whom will be familiar.  There’s Tereus the butcher, and his wife Procne; Echo, a woman who lives in a cave and sleeps with the men of the town; Lycaon, the rope-maker Cotta lives with, a man who is often to be seen roaming the hills by night.  It eventually becomes clear that Cotta has wandered into a strange realm, where the line between reality and fiction has blurred.  In search of a new manuscript of the Metamorphoses, our friend seems to have inadvertently entered a land of the Metamorphoses, leading us to wonder if he’s actually ended up inside Naso’s work.

That’s not the only bizarre element to Die letzte Welt, and there are many strange details for the unwary reader right from the start.  You see, the rumours of Ovid’s death would have started in around 17 A.D., yet there are frequent appearances here of slightly anachronistic details.  Did Rome really have bookshops at the time?  Was ‘transatlantic’ an ancient concept?  Weren’t fireworks a much later invention?  Gradually, these oddities become even starker, with the appearance of outdoor movie screenings, telephones, steamships (The Argo!) and barbed wire – at which point it’s probably best just to sit back and let it all wash over you…

As was the case with my first taste of Ransmayr’s work, Der Fliegende Berg (The Flying Mountain), it’s all wonderfully written, and this time the writer uses slightly more standard prose.  The book is an excellent depiction of a community huddled in its precarious location, at the mercy of the elements.  The inhabitants often find themselves hiding away from the storms that lash the town, or the landslides that roll down the mountains and force shepherds to seek sanctuary in the town.  Thanks to the writer’s skill, we feel every step of Cotta’s arduous journeys to Trachila, and can picture the wilderness he finds there.

Another feature of the novel is the way the writer develops stories within the story.  Those with a good knowledge of the Metamorphoses might recognise several tales that have been taken from Ovid’s masterpiece and left to unfurl, in slightly different form, amongst the ruins of Tomi.  These are skilful adaptations that unsettle both Cotta and the reader – we’re never quite sure if we’re in a dream, in the streets of the town or tucked between the pages of the great poet’s work.

Die letzte Welt isn’t always the easiest of books to get through (a back-cover blurb from Anthony Burgess says that Ransmayr certainly doesn’t provide light bedtime reading!), but it’s an excellent, enjoyable work, nonetheless.  Ransmayr takes the story of Ovid’s exile and blends it with the poet’s work to create a new story of a man discovering what it means to reach the end of the world.

Sounds good?  Well, there’s good news and bad news.  The good news is that there is an English-language translation, The Last World, translated by John E. Woods.  The bad news is that it seems to be out of print, so you’ll need to hunt around for a second-hand copy.  It’s well worth it though, so here’s to happy hunting in second-hand bookshops and the digital realm  🙂