Customer Reviews
A Great Modern Writer Filling In The Blanks Of A Classic 
2008-09-25
This novel is a must-read and an amazing and unexpected turn from one of the best-loved writers of sci-fi/fantasy around today. Ursula LeGuin re-tells certain episodes in Virgil's Aeneid from the perspective of Lavinia, the Latin princess whom Aeneas ultimately marries to found the lineage that would later found and lead Rome. In Virgil's play, Lavinia never speaks and is only briefly described. LeGuin gives her voice and creates a remarkable and memorable character.
LeGuin does much more than just re-tell a classic in a modern voice, such as John Steinbeck did with the Arthurian myths. Nor is she just recasting myths from a feminist perspective, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does so well. To the contrary, LeGuin seems to strive -- given the limits of writing in English in the 21st Century -- to have Lavinia speak and act as an ancient proto-Roman woman, adhering as faithfully as she can to the source material. LeGuin seems to flesh out Lavinia as Virgil would have -- if only he'd thought more about her and given her as much ink as he did, for example, with Dido. After narrating the closing episodes of The Aeneid from Lavinia's perspective, LeGuin audaciously finishes the story. One of the most unsatisfying aspects of The Aeneid is that it feels unfinished -- the conventional history is that Virgil had not finished it and left instructions for it to be burned at his death. LeGuin finishes the story lovingly, unflinchingly, and, in the end, satisfyingly.
Without spoiling the plot, LeGuin also interjects a metaphysical twist to Lavinia's existence that is as thought-provoking as her excellent novel Lathe of Heaven. Even though anyone familiar with The Aeneid knows how many of the key events must play out, this novel is full of twists even while adhering faithfully to Virgil's story.
If you know The Aeneid, if you like LeGuin's prior work, or if you like to read, this novel is worth reading. Like most great novels, my only disappointment was that it had to end.
I loved it. 2008-09-23
I loved this book. I am a big fan of Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, and I found Lavinia to be as pleasing to read with lots of farmland imagery, simple life-lesson one liners, and of course intense womanly world knowledge.
It is the kind of book you do not want to put down for fear of returning to the modern world. Excellent, heart wrenching, beautiful, sensual.
Contingent 
2008-08-30
Lavinia, the title character of Ursula LeGuin's unusual novel, is a character from Virgil's AENEID. She plays an important function in that epic about the forefather of the Roman people, because she will become Aeneas' wife and the mother of his son Aeneas Silvius. First mentioned in Book VII, just beyond the half-way point, she becomes the cause of the wars between the Trojans and the Latin tribes that occupy the last six books of the saga. But although she is desired and fought over, she remains a peripheral character whom Virgil never allows to speak. LeGuin now remedies that omission.
"I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. [...] I won't die. Of that I am all but certain. My life is too contingent to lead to anything so absolute as death." In these passages near the beginning of the book, Lavinia recognizes herself as primarily a character of fiction -- Virgil's fiction, and now her own. That is what she means by "contingent," a word that recurs often. In one of her most brilliant strokes, LeGuin, with the imaginative freedom of a science-fiction writer, has Lavinia travel backwards and forwards in time, knowing not only her own history but also parts of her future, and communicating directly with the poet who gave her birth. The two early scenes in which the spirit of the dying Virgil appears to the teenage girl at night in a sacred grove are among the most effective in the book.
But "contingent" has other meanings. In Virgil's epic, as in those of Homer, the actions of men are partly controlled by the intervention of the gods; the whole AENEID can be seen as the outcome of a struggle between Venus and Juno. In writing of the early Italian tribes, LeGuin goes to a simpler form of religion, whose deities are treated as relatives and mentors, appearing in birds and trees, hills and streams. This rural pantheism gives LAVINIA a simple and welcoming setting, in which even the cities seem little more than the clustered houses of the farmers who work the surrounding lands. The absence of distant controlling gods does not make the characters any less contingent on the omens and auguries they draw from the natural world around them; obedience to such influences is a mark of piety and honor, and there are several times where they redirect the whole course of the action. Lavinia has an especially close affinity with the land and its creatures, so the omens that speak to her seem less like outside forces than a reflection of her own sense of what is right.
"Contingent," alas, can often be applied to women's dependent relationship with men. Lavinia, for Virgil, is little more than a trophy, for whom -- no, for which -- Aeneas fights and ultimately kills the Rutulian prince Turnus. But LeGuin paints a society in which women are, literally, given a seat at the table. Her Lavinia has her father's ear and a place in his affections. She has personality and feelings, fire and a will of her own, and she gets to exercise it. Later in the passage quoted above, Lavinia compares herself to a princess who features at the start of Virgil's epic: "Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate." In writing LAVINIA, LeGuin gives her heroine a feminist liberation. When she is free and follows her heart, in her struggles with her mother, and even when she has to fight against residual male domination, Lavinia is a character to weep over and cheer for. But when, about halfway through the book, the action descends into descriptions of male wars, with long roll-calls of soldiers and warring factions, the title character is momentarily eclipsed. She re-emerges in the second half, which follows her story after the AENEID ends and shows her as a mother rather than a bride. There is a lot here that is interesting, including Lavinia's troubled relationship with her step-son Ascanius, but I feel that without a parallel Virgil text to illuminate, without his compelling time-line, LeGuin's narrative loses cogency and focus. A pity.
Beautiful prose! 2008-08-27
Le Guin proves her literary prowess once again in this brilliant rethinking of Virgil's classic The Aeneid. With a beautiful simplicity of prose, Le Guin recreates the world of Lavinia, destined mother of the Roman Empire, and gives voice to a character who lacked a single line of speech. This book is gorgeous, and I could not read it fast enough.
"And war and glory followed her" 2008-08-12
For Lavinia, the heroine of this novel, for a long time, love, or the possibility of it seems lost until she meets Aeneas, the handsome and virile Trojan hero, a foreigner from the other side of the world who sails up the Tiber into a country that will soon become Italy and whom Lavinia is eventually fated to marry. A fully independent spirit and a king's daughter, Lavinia is also a marriageable virgin, obedient and ready to a man's will.
We first meet Lavinia living a charmed and mercurial existence, keeping the storerooms of the Kings house while she frolics in the meadows of Latium with her best friend Silvia. Lavinia's ageing father Latinus is devoted to her and she provides a solace for him, but her mother, Amata harbors a bitter resentment towards her daughter after illness claimed the lives of Lavinia's two infant brothers. For years Lavinia has gotten by without the love of her mother, a woman who has buried herself in the crimp of loathing and a type of desolate scornful fury.
Fuelled by grief Amata, wild with her manner and imperious, while also willful and hot-tempered sees a match with her nephew, the splendidly handsome blue-eyed Rutulian King Turnus who arrives, well-made and muscular, young man with rife with "hot blood running through his veins." Already wooed and won by him with his tales of exploits, and triumphs and skirmishes, Amata fanatically pressures for a marriage even as Lavinia becomes a shrinking silent maiden. Lavinia readily admits that she hadn't given any thought to love and marriage for "my realm was virginity and I was at home in it." Feeling false, frightened, incredulous, scornful and alone with her mother silently turning her rage against her, Lavinia's marriage to Turnus seems inevitable, "to accept another suitor would be to bring civil war to the Kingdom." Turnus has to win and be the master and he would never let another man have woman he had claimed.
But then in a sacred pace, where the stinking sulfur water comes up from under the earth to make pools on the earth, a wraith appears in the form of a dying man who had not yet been born and who knows about Lavinia's past and her future. As he buries deep into her soul he tells Lavinia of the prophecy that a man is coming and that she would marry a true hero. The man is Aeneus, but he is no ordinary man having led his people for seven years across the land and sea. Now he is bringing his gods with him, and guided by omens and oracles, he is destined to rule the whole country and to found a glorious everlasting empire.
But Lavinia also learns of another prophecy, of a great city that lies in ruins, utterly destroyed and burned, the earth itself burned with "black oily clouds," and that her beloved Aeneas must die only after three years and widow her. Yet it is in this sacred world, full of gods, and portents of great powers and presences that Lavinia faces her most difficult choice: being loyal to her true love, the hero or the poet, her husband, the beautiful man whose flesh her flesh encloses, or listening to the other: a whisper in the shadows, a virgin's dream or vision, yet the author of all her being. Thrown into a fuming pot of petty feuds, both Lavinia and Aeneus find themselves at the mercy of the machinations of Amata and Turnus, both hero and heroine caught up in an epic battle and quickly embroiled in a clash of Turnus' own ambitions to rule and his desire to be with the woman who will cement his power.
Of course the final epic battle is drenched in blood and the sweat of Etruscans, Greeks and Trojans with armies of men with their swords rising and falling, the horrible noise of soldiers screaming even as both Aeneas and Turnus try to match their strength to the bitter and bloody end. Le Guinn paints these scenes with a type of hellish and heroic grandeur complete with battlement sieges, slaughter and rape, slave-taking, towns burning, and also men who rant and boast and then kill more men. In the end, the fury of bloodlust is overcome in battle, turning Aeneas reluctantly into a mindless indiscriminate slaughterer.
Even when the delicate truce is broken, the poor Lavinia must still follow her fate as the poet had told it. With bees that writhe in a cloud of smoke, humming and droning, Lavinia's blazing hair, scattering parks and smoke, and Aeneas' shield with its mysterious foreshadowing of mighty buildings and endless wars, the fates in this novel continually spin out their measured thread of what was to be. Holding fast to Virgil's own epic poem of the Trojan warrior, this book is awash in myth and legend and delivers some powerful messages about the nature of honor, heroism, loyalty and love. Mike Leonard August 08.
A lyrical evocation of another time 2008-07-13
In a richly imagined, beautiful new novel, an acclaimed writer gives an epic heroine her voice
In
The Aeneid, Vergil’s hero fights to claim the king’s daughter, Lavinia, with whom he is destined to found an empire. Lavinia herself never speaks a word. Now, Ursula K. Le Guin gives Lavinia a voice in a novel that takes us to the half-wild world of ancient Italy, when Rome was a muddy village near seven hills.
Lavinia grows up knowing nothing but peace and freedom, until suitors come. Her mother wants her to marry handsome, ambitious Turnus. But omens and prophecies spoken by the sacred springs say she must marry a foreigner—that she will be the cause of a bitter war—and that her husband will not live long. When a fleet of Trojan ships sails up the Tiber, Lavinia decides to take her destiny into her own hands. And so she tells us what Vergil did not: the story of her life, and of the love of her life.
Lavinia is a book of passion and war, generous and austerely beautiful, from a writer working at the height of her powers.
2008-07-09
There is a scene in Aeneid X where Juno pleads with Jupiter on behalf of her protégé Turnus who is doomed to die: "Change for the better the plans you have made for him - for you can do it!" (...et melius tua qui potes orsa reflectas).
Only Jupiter can change a preordained fate. Other deities can delay, hinder or help, but the outcome cannot be changed.
Jupiter can do it - but so can the poet. Vergil, who invented fates for all the characters in his epic, could have changed them at will. He invented Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, destined to marry the foreigner Aeneas rather than an Italian prince, and become the founding mother of the Roman race. But he left her unfinished, a mere name, a shadowy figure without a voice.
But now Ursula Le Guin plucks her from obscurity and gives her a voice. Young Lavinia tells us how she encountered the shade of Vergil ("my poet") at the sacred spring where her father goes to consult the ancestral oracle. He speaks to her, tells her about the epic he wrote. He regrets some of the omissions and misjudgments he made: she corrects his misconceptions. He asks her to tell him about her life in pre-Roman Latium, before the arrival of the Trojans - and thus we are drawn into a Bronze Age culture we know very little about.
Le Guin combines a flair for historical fantasy with the skills required for anthropological research. (No surprise here: she is the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, the anthropologist).
The gods of the Graeco-Roman pantheon mean nothing to Lavinia. Juno and Venus, the rival goddesses of the Aeneid, who constantly interfere with the action, are nothing but foreign names to her. She believes in omens, in oracles, in the spirits and wisdom of ancestors. She has a strong sense of 'fas' and 'nefas', of right and wrong. She delights in the daily rituals entrusted to her - tending the storerooms, minding the servants, preparing sacrifices, spinning and weaving : the realm of the penates, the household gods.
In her retelling of the main events of the Aeneid, Le Guin follows the Vergilian text pretty closely. Lavinia learns from Vergil what happened before; but after the Trojans have landed, she becomes a participant in the action. Knowing what fate has in store for her, she never wavers in her conviction that the prophecy must be fulfilled. She is not meek - she asks plenty of questions and voices her own opinion. But her 'pietas' (the same quality that distinguishes Aeneas) overcomes all obstacles.
Queen Amata's infatuation with Turnus, her scheming against Latinus and Lavinia, her mad Bacchic revels in the hills above the city are spun into colorful episodes.
There are touches of whimsy: Turnus brings Lavinia a monkey as a gift. Euryalus wears a red Phrygian cap...
Vergil's Aeneid ends with the slaying of Turnus - to the dismay of generations of readers who would have liked to see the wedding of Aeneas and Lavinia. Well, Le Guin gives us the wedding, and more: Aeneas builds a city, Lavinium, begets a son, Silvius, and rules wisely, together with Latinus, over his new tribe. Trojan warriors marry Latin women, babies are born. True love blooms in the marriage of the Trojan leader and the Latin princess.
I would have liked it to end here, but Le Guin presses on: Aeneas dies an inglorious death at the hands of a cattle thief whom he has spared ('parcere subiectis' - spare the defeated - had been one of the injunctions given him by his father Anchises; he had ignored the warning when he killed Turnus). There is trouble with Ascanius, Aeneas' Trojan son. Lavinia is exiled and raises her son Silvius in the woods (as envisioned by Anchises), but in the end, Silvius becomes king, and Lavinia is restored to queenly status.
'Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem' - it was so much trouble to found the Roman race.
At the very end of the novel, we realize that Lavinia, the girl, the woman who told us her story, who seemed so real, so down-to-earth and level-headed, has become a spirit herself, a ghost whispering to us from the oak tree near the sacred spring.
She has attained immortality.
Lavinia 2008-07-03
This is a wonderful adventure. A womans view of life, love, marriage and war. Ursula LeGuin give a voice to a character not previously heard from.
Mythic tale of Rome's founding 2008-06-27
Made immortal by Virgil in his epic, "The Aeneid," Lavinia never gets to speak a word in the poem. Though her destined marriage to Trojan Aeneus is the beginning of the Roman people and its ancient connection with Troy, Lavinia remains a silent symbol.
"He gave me a long life but a small one. I need room, I need air," she says early on in Le Guin's novel.
And Le Guin gives it to her. Lavinia's narration is self-aware and mythic. "No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may be so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her."
But Lavinia's story is also passionate and full of earthy, daily details. She is both centuries-old legend and flesh-and-blood woman.
She is the daughter of a substantial rural king, Latinus of Latium. Her mother, once a sunny woman, has been driven mad with grief over the death of her sons and begrudges the life of her healthy daughter. As Lavinia reaches marriageable age, suitors come calling.
Her mother favors one of the neighboring kings, lusty, ambitious Turnus, and Lavinia blushes and stammers in his company. But Lavinia also propitiates the gods at the sacred springs where she bows to the prophecy that she will marry a foreigner and become the cause of a bitter war in order to found the beginnings of a great empire. When Aeneus' ships arrive, she recognizes her destiny.
On the banks of the sacred springs the 19-year-old Lavinia also communes with the spirit of the dying poet, Virgil, who laments that he did not know her better before he died (some scholars say Virgil died before completing the epic, which would have included more about Lavinia, or at least Aeneus' marriage to her).
Winner of numerous awards for her fantasy novels, Le Guin reimagines history with as vivid an eye as she creates worlds of fantasy. From the market towns and poorer realms around Latinus to the details of plowing, herding, gathering precious salt from beds by the sea, the spelt meal and goat's milk of daily meals and the golden goblets of banquets - Le Guin creates a bustling, lively world.
But while Lavinia spins wool and gathers sacred salt and runs in the creek with her friends, she also willingly embodies destiny and legend. Beautifully written, Le Guin's novel will appeal to her legions of fans as well as fans of Steven Saylor's "Roma."
Life in magic, myth and fate 2008-06-22
Ursula LeGuin's novel extends The Aeneid, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC. Virgil was writing a founding myth of Rome, where the Trojan hero Aeneas, after many adventures in Cathage, Sicily and the underworld, arrives in Latium, near the eventual site of Rome. There he engages in warfare with the indigent clans and victorious, marries the local princess Lavinia to found the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
LeGuin's Aeneas is a Taoist ideal, the artisan attuned to the Way in its Augustan form as pietas, honour and duty. He contends with those overmastered by passions: King Turnus, who he kills (murders?) at the end of the Aeneid, and his own flawed son, Ascanius. Lavinia, a cipher in Virgil's poem, becomes a person in LeGuin's hands, but also an archetype: the owl of Minerva.
Other reviews here properly convey what a fine piece of writing this is. It works as history, a vivid picture of bronze-age life, and as a retelling of the last six books of the Aeneid. Lavinia lives her life, from small girl to her eventual destiny, in the immanent presence of magic, myth and fate. LeGuin ensures that the reader does too.
Note: it reminded me a little of "The Way of Wyrd" by Professor Brian Bates, which recreates the celtic 'life in magic' in dark ages Britain.
