''God Was Born in Exile'' (French: ''Dieu est né en exil'') is a novel by Romanian author Vintilă Horia, for which he was awarded the

Prix Goncourt The Prix Goncourt ( , "The Goncourt Prize") is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". The prize carries a symbolic reward of only 10 euros, but resul ...

in 1960, though he was never handed the prize following allegations that surfaced after his nomination that he had once been a member of the

Iron Guard The Iron Guard () was a Romanian militant revolutionary nationalism, revolutionary Clerical fascism, religious fascist Political movement, movement and political party founded in 1927 by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as the Legion of the Archangel M ...

. The novel's narrator is

Ovid Publius Ovidius Naso (; 20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he i ...

, the Roman

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

, and this apocryphal work is rather similar to Marguerite Yourcenar's '' Mémoires d'Hadrien'' in which Yourcenar writes the Roman emperor

Hadrian Hadrian ( ; ; 24 January 76 – 10 July 138) was Roman emperor from 117 to 138. Hadrian was born in Italica, close to modern Seville in Spain, an Italic peoples, Italic settlement in Hispania Baetica; his branch of the Aelia gens, Aelia '' ...

's mémoires. In ''God Was Born in Exile'', "Ovid" covers the last eight years of his life, when he was exiled to Tomis, an

Ancient Roman In modern historiography, ancient Rome is the Roman people, Roman civilisation from the founding of Rome, founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, collapse of the Western Roman Em ...

colony A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule, which rules the territory and its indigenous peoples separated from the foreign rulers, the colonizer, and their ''metropole'' (or "mother country"). This separated rule was often orga ...

in Scythia Minor. This novel adopts the form of a diary, divided into eight chapters (each of which corresponds to a year of exile) that reveal the steps of a progressive "maturation", or a conversion of sorts. The novel's universe is linked together around a primordial axis whose two poles are Roman society and the Dacian world, respectively. This

dichotomy A dichotomy () is a partition of a set, partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets). In other words, this couple of parts must be * jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and * mutually exclusive: nothi ...

generates a rich range of metaphors, but perhaps this novel's most important attribute is the way in which both worlds are constructed, and their importance as "chronotopes" in the narrative. Ovid's spiritual journey resolves itself between both symbolic universes whose antagonistic characters become interwoven during a chiasm, in order to rise up again at the end of the radically metamorphized narration.

External links

An article on the novel
(French) 1960 novels French-language novels Novels set in ancient Rome Novels set in the 1st century Romanian novels Prix Goncourt–winning works Cultural depictions of Ovid {{1960s-AncientRome-novel-stub