SOURCE: "The Wild Child," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XL, No. 20, December 2, 1993, pp. 13-15.

[In the review below, Truax offers a thematic discussion of Remembering Babylon.]

The Australian writer David Malouf is fascinated with the power of words, an obsession he shares with the characters in his books. At the opening of his second novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), the poet Ovid has arrived at a desolate edge of the Roman Empire, where he has been banished for tweaking the emperor's nose once too often. His new home is a village of huts, pigs, and mud. No one reads Latin; no one can even understand what he is saying. He walks around ranting during the daytime, cut off from the essential working life of the village, and at night he writes letters, even when there is no one to read them:

I speak to you, reader...