The Love-Artist: A Novel

By Jane Alison

A darkly brilliant first novel that imagines a missing chapter in the life of Ovid. Why was Ovid, the most popular author of his day, banished to the edges of the Roman Empire? Why do only two lines survive of his play Medea, reputedly his most passionate work and perhaps his most Accomplished? Between the known details of the poet's life and these enigmas, Jane Alison has Interpolated a haunting drama of passion and psychological manipulation. On holiday at the Black Sea, on the fringes of the Empire, Ovid encounters an almost otherworldly woman who seems to embody the fictitious creations of his soon-to-be-published Metamorphoses. Part healer, part witch, she seems myth come to life. Enchanted and obsessed -- and, for the first time in a long while, flush with inspiration -- Ovid takes her back with him to Rome. But the inexorable pull of ambition leads him to make a Faustian bargain with fate that will betray his newfound muse. As the two of them become entangled in its snares, the reader is drawn deep into an ingeniously enacted meditation on love, art, and the desire for immortality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 31, 2001
• ISBN: 9781429962193

Jane Alison

Jane Alison is the author of The Love-Artist and The Marriage of the Sea. She lives in Germany.

Book preview

PART ONE

1

It was a very hot day in June when Ovid first saw Xenia, nude and blue, on the farthest coast of the Black Sea, in the corner of the maps where sea monsters coiled and the river Ocean bit its own tail around the world; where he had collapsed upon a fallen tree trunk, his hair thick with salt and his sandals full of needles, exhausted from his journey.

Everyone on board had known who he was, giggling, jostling, pointing him out. By then his Loves and Art of Love were everywhere—not just in Rome but everywhere—the second one especially prized, being so wicked, with instructions on all things erotic, from rendezvous techniques to the most intimate rhythms. Girls murmured his words to each other as they stood before their mirrors; they arranged their hair this way and that and crouched, bare bottomed, looking back alluringly over their rumps. Oh no, that’s not your best view, they’d whisper to each other, advising as his book tongue-in-cheek coached. Your side is much better, with your thigh stretched long! His lines had become veils on the bodies of women as they strolled the streets of Rome, knowing how to deploy that full flank, that flaming nest of hair. He had set the city on fire!

But that, of course, was one of the reasons he’d decided to take this trip east. The Loves had barely slipped by, but The Art of Love … Augustus, intent on reinstating old-time morality in his new empire (after all the blood and proscriptions that had allowed him to establish it), had threatened the book with censorship before it even came out. So in a large dramatic gesture Ovid had burned the text, scattering the ashes upon the Tiber. But of course he had another copy, and, what with the demand created by all the publicity, it was secretly released later. Being rare, the books were exquisitely expensive—and that had come in handy, his funds never being as fluid as those of Augustus’s pet poets, who wrote of austere pleasures and of the magnificence of Rome. The emperor’s palace had growled at its role in the book’s success; Augustus ground his jaw and fixed Ovid with his gray eye from his stone-cold palace on the Palatine. So Ovid had decided, with the advice of Carus and Marcus and the others, that while his latest, Metamorphoses, was still at the copyists, he’d just dart off for a time.

But he was glad of it. He was edgy; he was sick of his frivolous reputation: he wanted his image transformed. Vergil, Horace—they were the true poets, gray and grave and weathered, heaven-borne already. But with Metamorphoses he thought he’d begun to shed that wearisome slick skin; he’d begun to finger live bones. And now he must continue, deepen—he must start something new. Although he didn’t know what yet, which, to tell the truth, was peculiar. Usually by the time he finished one book the next was already pecking, whereas, since completing this latest, he’d felt oddly scraped clean. But with some air, some distance: of course it would come.

It had taken two weeks in that first ship with its magnificent sails to get from Rome to Athens, another two crossing the Aegean, two again tacking north—that long, even though the winds were favorable, no magpies swooped from the left, no one dreamt of black boars, and the bulls’ entrails were always clean. Once they reached Athens, Ovid took a jaunt around the city, had a look at all the ruined statues poking their heads from the fields, remnants of Rome’s last sacking. But the weariness of it all irritated him, how handled it had been. All the monuments, artifacts, sightseers, guides. Quackery. Dust. Just seeing it made him dry up inside, made all inspiration expire. He didn’t know quite what he wanted—but it must be something more pristine, more primeval. So after a week he made the rounds down at the dock and booked passage for Asia Minor. But after a glimpse of Troy he shook his head. Troy, Troy: the very name made him tired, filled his nostrils with old, old dust. The woman, the thief, the great war: the poem. Who could ever compete. He’d always sided with Paris, anyway. Not for his wickedness, though—for his ruin.

At that point Ovid had sent his boy Lazar homeward, wishing to be alone for the rest of his blind adventure. This latest vessel, the one whose railing he gripped now as he stood watching the shadowy green hills go by, had creaked through the Dardanelles, up the Marmara, through the Bosporus, where the water flowed both ways, and had at last broken into the Black

Reviews for The Love-Artist

[et.carole · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book reminds me of some of the books I read for the fiction writing class in Greece, perhaps because it is set in ancient circumstances, but maybe because it blends more of the fantastic into the fabric of the historical setting. Giving Xenia the ability to see into the future gives the story a more comprehensive chronological sense, which is interesting as a reader aware of the variety of distances between here and Rome. The decision to spend so much time in Ovid and Xenia’s consciousness was a bit exhausting as a reader, and I would have preferred more action and dialogue. But as an authorial choice it made sense with the true topic of the story, because though framed as the story of their relationship, this is just the story of their independent characters, fiercely separated despite their intense temporary collision.

[janerawoof · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ovid, the Roman poet, was exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea for what he says in his "Tristia": Carmen et error [A poem and a mistake]. From this ambiguity, scholars and historians through the years have tried to puzzle out why he was exiled. Alison presents us with her speculation, giving us a lush, sensuous tale of Ovid and a mysterious "witch", Xenia, he meets on vacation on the Black Sea [a more salubrious part than his final home]. They fall in love and he takes her to Rome. He begins writing a tragedy of Medea with her as muse and model for the priestess. Xenia feels he has betrayed her with another woman. Jealous of his patroness, Julia, of the imperial family, she exacts a horrible vengeance. I could SEE all scenes before me vividly, despite the author's sometimes purple prose. Besides the jealousy and betrayal, a main theme is the permanence of art and the artist [in this case Ovid.] Will he always be remembered, he keeps asking her. The novel took awhile to pick up steam, but finally rolled on swiftly to its inexorable conclusion. This novel is the expression of the inner life of its characters. Recommended.

[chillybee · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

An interesting historical novel speculating on why Ovid was banished from Rome at the height of his fame. However I found it hard to read, the author getting carried away with her own elaborate prose and failing to just tell us what was actually happening in the story.

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Third book for October's readathon.This one's for a class -- the Batman was too, actually. This one was for historical fiction. I'll be interested to see why it's been picked for the course. For me it was such a heated, smothering, smouldering book. The idea is fascinating, transfiguring Ovid's life and even his disgrace and death into art, as the Ovid of the story transfigures Xenia into art. Unsubtle, in places, though. The prose is so lush, practically dripping with adjectives, adverbs; and Xenia, as a name? Evoking both the word xenos, stranger, and xenia, guest-friendship... and I'm not entirely sure the author thought about that latter meaning, because I can't really square it with the plot.It's sort of... lovely and repellant, in the same way as the character Xenia is lovely and repellant. Overall, glad to have read it, despite my ambivalent feelings toward it.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Two offenses ruined me: a poem and an error.Love and betrayal in Ancient Rome. No-one knows why the Roman poet Ovid was exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea, or why only two lines of his poem "Medea" have survived, so it leaves the novelist a lot of scope in imagining what could have happened.Ovid is out of favour with the puritanical Emperor Augustus after writing a book of advice about love, and decides that it might be prudent to leave Rome for a while. He takes a holiday on the Black Sea coast, while restlessly awaiting the publication of his latest work, "Metamorphoses", which he hopes may bring him back into favour at court, and while there he sees a young girl emerging from a pool like one of the transfigured characters from his book. Taking Xenia back to Rome with him, Ovid cynically manipulates her into fulfilling her role as his muse, and all the while he is desperate for her to use her witch's powers to tell him whether his work will survive him and his name will be known forever.Although their plots are very different, "The Love-Artist" reminded me of one of my favourite books, Naomi Mitchison's "The Corn King and the Spring Queen", whose main character is also a witch from the coast of Black Sea who travels to the (supposedly) more civilised parts of the Roman Empire.

[carmilla222 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a "quiet" novel, one that involves a lot of contemplation. My theory is that if your novel involves a lot of thinking/contemplation/dealing with something, then it better be about the most exciting people ever. And this one is about at least interesting people, Ovid and a witch. Somehow, it's still kind of boring.

[bladelily · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Somehow this book manages to convey a sense of Ovid's time while keeping a foot in a very modern sensibility. I wonder ... would a character like Xenia really have such autonomy? I would like to think so but I'm no scholar of the period.The prose is lush and heady, but not so much so that you lose track of what's going on. Sometimes it's the very sensuousness that makes you feel more accurately what's going on. The portrait of ancient Rome, as seen through the eyes of both Ovid who lives and breathes and loves it, and Xenia to whom it's all alien and doomed, is brilliant.I just have a couple of quibbles. Sometimes Alison seems too fond of her own adjectives. Maybe this is supposed to echo the style of classical epic (brave Ulysses & faithful Penelope & the wine-dark sea and all that), but I found it a flaw in otherwise compelling prose. I got really tired, for instance, of reading about Xenia's "glassy" hair in the first couple of chapters, and began to wonder, what color is her damned hair anyway? (Answer, finally gleaned from the Roman party girls' comments: it must be white-blonde.)My other quibble is yeah, Xenia is a seer, prophetess, what-have-you, but toward the novel's climax I think she's given more knowledge of various characters' activities than I think she'd reasonably have. But again, that's just a nitpick. It's barely a ripple on the fabulous current of this tale.Besides the beautiful, evocative, allusive writing, the thing I like best is that the author has taken what could have been a standard "literary" tale and refused to tread that biased & well-trodden ground. You have your passionate & driven man and your passionate but naive woman. In so many of these stories there's a horrible murder or betrayal and the literary twist is "she drove him to it" through the awesome power of her femaleness, yada yada. This sexist bushwa is unfortunately painfully prevalent in art throughout the centuries. How decent, how much more realistic, how much more authentic is Alison's presentation of Xenia not as The Female Other but as active, conscious actor in the story with her own ambitions, her own work, her own perceptions, and a normal human sense of self-preservation, alongside Ovid's own equally compelling inner workings.The killer thing here is that Alison threads this normal and reasonable line through a setting of heavy sensuality, emotion & portent. In one sense this is a fantastic novel in the original sense of the word; no one's life is like this (is it?). In another sense, this is one of those rare books with a true portrait of the inner life of a woman as well as that of a man.