Written much later in 2012, Atlas of an Anxious Man consists of 70 episodes in which the author remembers the places he has journeyed across several decades. "This remarkable second novel … carries the conviction of an ominous dream," said the The New York Times. 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.Austrian Ransmayr's first novel, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (1984), based on an Austro-Hungarian expedition team's journey to the North Pole, was followed by his surreal, critically-acclaimed 1988 novel, The Last World, which drew on Ovid's Metamorphoses as it shifted between time and place. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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