"How close to where I live lie the ultimate ends of the earth," Ovid wrote from Tomis, the semisavage Black Sea village to which he had been exiled by Augustus in A.D. 8. History is silent about the reason for the sudden banishment from Rome of its wittiest, gayest poet, last of the generation that included Virgil, Horace and Propertius. Ovid himself thought he was being punished for his writing. "My only fault is that I possess both talent and taste," he claimed in the "Tristia," a long, half-defiant, half-abject poem that he thought would somehow win him imperial forgiveness (it did not; he died in exile sometime after A.D. 16) and that gives a vivid picture of the many miseries of life in Tomis. (p. 10)

From this meager historical background the Australian poet David Malouf has fashioned an extraordinary novel. "An Imaginary Life" is just that: a...