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| Lavinia | 
 enlarge | Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 11238
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0151014248
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780151014248
ASIN: 0151014248
Publication Date: April 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Virgil: The Le Guin Remix April 25, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Two things I appreciated about Lavinia beyond the exceptional skill with words and characterization that I have come to expect from Ursula Le Guin:
1. I enjoyed her keen perspective on the Aeneid. I read the epics of Homer and Virgil back in college and so the conversations in this novel between Virgil and Lavinia made me laugh uproariously yet at the same time had a lot of depth. Lavinia has a perspective on the events in these stories that is all her own.
2. This book brought early Roman culture and religion to life for me. Before reading this novel, I hadn't considered looking into early Roman culture, but now I might just check up on some of the histories Le Guin mentions in her acknowledgements.
To appreciate this novel more, I would have liked to reread the Aeneid first, but it was worth the read anyway and I think it'd be fun even if I hadn't read Virgil.
 A wonderful story with engaging characters May 13, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I didn't take Latin in school and nobody ever made me read THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSEY or THE AENID, even in translation. So although I am an enormous admirer of Ursula K. Le Guin's extraordinary fantasy novels --- her imagined cultures often subvert our assumptions about politics, gender and reality itself (I particularly recommend THE DISPOSSESSED, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and The Earthsea Cycle, whose wizardry way outstrips Harry Potter's) --- I know zilch about Classical history and literature.
Admittedly, a few larger-than-life figures (Hercules, Odysseus, Aeneas) are iconic --- their statues are all over the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Greek and Roman galleries. But those are the heroes. What about heroines? The only ones who come to mind are troublemakers like Helen of Troy, prophetesses like Cassandra, or noble suicides like Dido of Carthage.
Which brings us to Lavinia, who is none of the above. To make a long story ridiculously short, after the Greek victory in the Trojan War the legendary warrior Aeneas escapes to Latium, a then-obscure region of pre-Roman Italy. Lavinia, the local princess, is to be married off to a puffed-up, self-important suitor, but prophecy insists that she will wed a foreigner --- and Aeneas is the obvious candidate. Fighting ensues. There is only the briefest mention of Lavinia in Virgil's original (unfinished) poem; it is Le Guin's notion to re-create and complete this chapter of THE AENEID with her as the protagonist, not a mere pawn in men's games of war and power.
In this I think Le Guin is motivated in part by feminist impulses; as she writes in an Afterword, women in Latium (and later, Rome) were freer and more respected than in Greek society, where they were little better than slaves. She also wants to go against the grain of the conventional epic's emphasis on battle and male heroics, expressing a woman's jaundiced view of war (sadly, all too relevant today). Under her father's benign rule, Lavinia knew only tranquility and is shocked by the bellicose rage that seizes her country with the coming of the Trojans: "I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste."
Le Guin diverges from her source in spiritual matters as well. Instead of the Olympian interventions so characteristic of Classical literature (Aeneas is supposed to be the son of Aphrodite, who often steps in on his behalf), Lavinia's world is stamped by a sort of pantheism; nature itself is sacred. As she puts it: "We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens." Some of the gods she tends and/or pays tribute to (vegetarian and animal-lover alert: there are a lot of sacrifices) are humble household deities or somewhat nebulous oracles; others are grand divinities like Mars. In either case, the mystery and ritual permeating Latinian culture seem very close to the magic of Le Guin's Earthsea books. Maybe LAVINIA is not such a departure for her after all. She is reconstructing a whole culture, if not actually inventing one.
Yet this isn't a traditional historical novel --- it's too twisty and many-layered for that. Often Lavinia speaks both as literary creation and real woman (how postmodern!), and Le Guin tinkers slyly with time, particularly in the first few chapters, when Virgil appears as a shade at the sacred spring. He shows Lavinia Aeneas's past (a neat way of summarizing the action in earlier portions of THE AENEID), her own destiny as wife and widow, and how hers and Aeneas's descendants would build the great city of Rome, in whose "golden" imperial age the poet lived and wrote. This temporal elasticity, though occasionally confusing, seems consistent with the weight given to omens and portents in Lavinia's society. For her people, the future is embedded in the present, and a profound sense of fate informs daily life.
I don't want to make LAVINIA sound like a heavyweight fable. Although Le Guin's language is sometimes more stately and self-consciously "poetic" than in her fantasy novels, she tells a wonderful story with engaging characters. Lavinia is a strong and persuasive protagonist who seizes her destiny rather than simply bowing to it. By refusing to marry Turnus, the local suitor, she is not only obeying a prophecy but also speaking from her own heart. She does not trust her mother, half-crazed by the early loss of Lavinia's twin brothers, and she is bound to her father by affection and respect as well as duty. Further, Lavinia and Aeneas's passionate love is poignantly evoked (for Lavinia has been told by her ghostly poet that they will have but three years together, and she counts off the seasons with a sense of dread), and Aeneas's character is a serious portrait of a true hero: modest, thoughtful, not bloodthirsty. "If you are to rule Latium after me," he tells his son Ascanius, "...I want to know that you'll learn how to govern, not merely make war...that you'll learn to seek your manhood on a greater field than the battlefield."
I must confess, though, that I prefer Le Guin's fantasies. I think she is liberated by the creation of her own worlds; here, she sometimes seems constrained by her literary model --- she calls the book a "love offering" to Virgil, and her introduction of the poet as a ghostly character actually bogs the story down just when it should be taking off. Still, LAVINIA made me want to read THE AENEID --- finally. There's supposed to be a very good recent translation by Robert Fagles, who also did THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY. Maybe it isn't too late for me to get a proper Classical education after all....
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
Contingent August 30, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
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.
The Laviniad carries the torch May 29, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
In her afterword, LeGuin is explicit about her intentions as a writer. I think she will forgive me, a grateful reader, for appearing to contradict her in my own response to the novel. Likewise, I think she will indulge me in renaming her book "The Laviniad."
"Lavinia" is LeGuin's grateful gift to Virgil, a loving reciprocation for his gift to her (and all of us), the Aeneid. (It is also, unavoidably, an answer of sorts to Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad.) More than "a riff on the Aeneid", as she called it at Powell's, it is a completion of sorts, carrying on where Virgil was (some say) compelled by death to leave off. (The Aeneid stops abruptly at the point where Aeneas kills Turnus.) But, just as the Aeneid is a semi-sequel to the Iliad, but with its own imagination and its own organizing principles, so is the Laviniad a semi-sequel to the Aeneid, moving the story forward, but centered around characters peripheral to, or absent from, its literary predecessor. This is, most of all, Lavinia's story. But it is also, like the Aeneid, Aeneas' story and Rome's story, called forth this time from the imagination of LeGuin, who took the torch from Virgil, who had it from Homer.
Aeneas' killing of Turnus, which kills the Aeneid, becomes here the critical moment that shapes Aeneas' eventual death, and haunts his conscience along the way. In the center of this arc, we hear this Socratic conversation, in which Aeneas is simultaneously wrestling with his own angel and trying to pass the torch of piety to his son Ascanius.
"But what is piety?" Aeneas asked.
That brought a thoughtful silence.
"Obedience to the will of the powers of earth and sky?" I said at last, making my statement a question, as women so often do.
"The effort to fulfill one's destiny," Achates said.
"Doing right," said Illivia, Serestus' wife, a calm, forceful woman from Tusculum, who had become one of my dearest friends.
"What is right in battle, in war?" Aeneas asked.
"Skill, courage, strength," Ascanius answered promptly. "In war, virtue is piety. Fighting to win!"
"So victory makes right?"
"Yes," Ascanius said, and several of the men nodded vigorously; but the older Trojans, some of them, did not. Nor did the women.
"I cannot make it out," Aeneas said in his quiet voice. "I thought what a man knew he ought to do was what he must do. But what if they're not the same? Then, to win a victory is to be defeated. To uphold order is to cause disorder, ruin, death. Virtue and piety destroy each other. I cannot make it out."
Elegant, spare, rich May 8, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I loved this book for its wisdom and its tenderness and for the spare, elegant richness of its language. Stories have been pouring out of Le Guin these last few years, as if the ripeness of her words must be shared. We are so grateful.
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