[ book tip by Gábor Palkó ] How should we approach a literary masterpiece that was created hundreds or, rather, thousands of years ago? What mysterious series of transmissions and transformations allows us to pass a work on and make it part of our cultural heritage in the first place? These questions are especially relevant if we see them in the context of a work that is itself about never-ending changes of form. Ovid’s Metamorphoses are not just the bedrock of Greco-Roman mythology; rather they are also a literary legend, one giving rise to a wealth of allusions, readings and uses. It is precisely these readings that make the legend speak to us over a distance of two thousand years.  The Last World fits well into this frequently uncritical and indiscernible process. Christoph Ransmayr’s novel was published in 1988 (the translation into Hungarian, seven years later) and constitutes a sort of reformulation of the Metamorphoses. It is paraphrase, historical novel and detective story all rolled into one; an investigation based on the Metamorphoses and their author in an era that has never existed, that anachronisms, and incompatible temporal and cultural worlds have neither fractured nor broken but actually produced. The novel is a mass of fragments and references that cancel each other out, a web in which ancient myths, Christian symbolism, cataclysms and snatches of text are layered over one another. The only consistent phenomenon in this world of ‘always and never’ is change itself, the transformation that rarely or never brings about an improvement but, on the contrary, destruction, annihilation and decay. It gives rise to a ‘last world’ that has always been decaying and does not display a single new element, but portrays the reformulation of something past. Yet the note the work strikes while describing the process is by no means tragic. Rather it presents itself to the reader as the way in which time, culture and literature function – in other words, not as a diagnosis, but as the corpus of a work, as a mechanism presented and exemplified through the objectivity of the body of the work.

[ book info ] Ransmayr, Christoph: The Last World. (original language: Deutsch) Trans. by John E. Woods. Grove Press, New York, 1996 . ISBN: 978-0802134585.