V.'s point of departure is an apparent paradox of scholarship on Ovid's Metamorphoses. Despite the growing mountain of secondary literature on the poem, she submits, its title-theme – transformative change and how it figures in the epic – has received only marginal or compressed attention. Articles or chapters on metamorphosis in the Metamorphoses certainly exist (notably A. Feldherr's superb contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Ovid edited by P. Hardie) and most Ovidian scholars of course touch upon the phenomenon in one way or another. But as of yet, V. argues, the theme has failed to receive an investigation of monographic length and tends to be subsumed under other thematic concerns, such as love or politics. Her own treatment stands apart for its focus and determination to extrapolate a coherent poetic and philosophical programme from the Metamorphoses firmly grounded in Ovid's treatment of transformative change. Two heuristic concepts guide her exegesis of the epic: the aesthetic principle of variatio and the notion of the ‘five elements’ (earth, water, air and fire, to which V. adds the human being) that turn the Metamorphoses into a ‘pentavalent poem’.

The volume is divided into three parts. Part 1, ‘Les contours indistincts. Frontieres de la metamorphose’, consists of three chapters, designed to explore how Ovid met the challenge of obviating boredom in a world history that revolves around the incessant and ineluctable return of the same phenomenon. V. reads the Metamorphoses as a bravura performance in how to avoid the monotony that comes with repetition. Chapter 1 explores the absence of metamorphosis as a first form of variation. Instances of what V. calls métamorphoses manquées include Phaethon's incomplete transformation into the Sun or the transformative hallucinations induced by Bacchus: Agave, in her insanity, transforms Pentheus into a boar and treats him as such. Chapter 2, ‘Two Material and Extreme Forms of Metamorphosis’, considers transformative change of cosmic remit (such as the generation of the universe out of chaos) and, in contrapost, stories in which metamorphosis figures in a compressed, allusive or fragmentary fashion (such as the transformation of Syrinx in Book 1, a story which Ovid notoriously presents as one that his internal narrator Mercury would have recounted if Argus had not fallen asleep at the very start). The title of Chapter 3, ‘Ivresse de la metamorphose?’, which is borrowed from a novel-fragment by Stefan Zweig (‘Rausch der Verwandlung’), is designed to capture the intoxicating transformative energies at play in the Metamorphoses, which embrace and condition both the bodies within the stories and the text itself. V. here sums up her earlier findings and introduces the notion that will underwrite the second part of her investigation, which discusses the Metamorphoses as a ‘pentavalent poem’.

Part 2: ‘Fragments of an Imaginary Cartography: the Narratives of Metamorphosis’, begins with a prologue dedicated to the theme of anthropogenesis. V. here surveys such stories as Deucalion and Pyrrha, human birth from dragon's teeth (Cadmus, Jason), the Myrmidons, Tages and Pygmalion, but also tales of re-transformation, such as those of Io or the companions of Ulysses and sex-change (Iphis) as well as rejuvenation (Aeson). Four chapters follow, one each dedicated to one of the usual four elements and how they prevail in different types of transformative change. To begin with, V. identifies water as ‘a vital element’ in Ovidian metamorphosis – witness the nymphs who turn to water on a regular basis, from Cyane to Egeria, but also Marsyas. Water yields the stage to a chapter on earth, which covers individuals who become part of the landscape (such as Atlas), petrifaction and transformations of humans into various types of flora and land animals. In Chapter 3, which is dedicated to air and dreams, V. includes the change of humans into birds, bats or sound effects (Echo), but also Arachne's veil of illusions. In the final chapter of Part 2, V. focusses on the series of apotheoses that Ovid recounts primarily in the later books of the poem, culminating with that of Caesar in Book 15. In all, V.'s classifications are plausible enough to corroborate her view of the Metamorphoses as a pentavalent poem at some level, but they are not sufficiently and systematically compelling to turn her approach into the key that unlocks all its secrets.

The final Part 3 consists of two chapters, both of which return on a more abstract level to the theme of variation and explore the essential role it plays in Ovidian poetics, and Ovid's conception of poetic language and the figure of the poet. Here V. attempts to answer ‘the three great questions’ that animate her study: how to define the complex relationship between Ovid's subject matter (metamorphosis) and his commitment to the literary principle of variatio; the implications of the perfect harmony between theme and form that Ovid achieves for the meaning and function of metamorphosis in the epic; and what we may learn from Ovid's approach to metamorphosis for his conception of creative poetry. In one of her key arguments, V. maintains that the surface of Ovid's stories of transformative change does not hide depths of meaning to be discovered, but constitutes itself a ‘plunge’ into what Bachelard has called ‘the core of being’ (to paraphrase from her conclusion). Her emphasis on language as a medium of transformative play fits nicely with other recent work on the poem, such as G. Tissol's notion of ‘glittering trifles’ (The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid's Metamorphoses [1997]) or M.L. von Glinski's Simile and Identity in Ovid's Metamorphoses (2012).

The rearguard of the volume consists of an annex that catalogues the stories recounted by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, a bibliography (broken up into different categories which, combined with the Harvard-style mode of citation, makes it a nightmare to negotiate) and indexes. The monograph is not an easy read, in part because V., just like her chosen author, practises repetition in variation; but it offers a sophisticated, provocative and stimulating vision of Ovid's poetics and philosophy of metamorphosis that every student of the poem would wish to engage.