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| Lavinia | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Harcourt
Category: EBooks
List Price: $19.20
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $9.21 (48%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 2226
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
ASIN: B001E95MWC
Publication Date: April 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Masterpiece April 6, 2008
71 out of 76 found this review helpful
At what is undeniably the height of her writing prowess, Ursula K. Le Guin brings us a novel of incredible richness and depth. As example I offer this: It is the only book I have read that contains a self-aware character. Lavinia sees herself as a character, brought into being by Virgil's poem and given immortality by her scant share of it. "I am contingent," she tells us early on, perhaps meaning that her being is dependent upon Virgil who will be born many centuries in her future.
What emerges under Le Guin's careful stewardship of this fragile being, brought into existence by a passing remark of a poet, is a rich landscape of simple country life. Along with Lavinia we experience the joys and comfort of simple rituals, offerings to household gods and the spinning of wool. We witness the arrival of a great hero as foretold by ancient oracles. As treaties are made and broken we endure the horror of war and then watch with pondering inevitability as the happiness of marriage swiftly becomes the tragedy of a widow and the squandering of a husband's dream.
We are redeemed in the end by Lavinia's immortality and by, again, the inevitability of history. Rome is founded. Virgil writes his epic. Lavinia is given life.
With her skill, Le Guin does more than expand upon the immortal life that Virgil granted to Lavinia, she draws us into that life. Lavinia speaks to us across the centuries, but through Le Guin's work, we also wander the wooded hills of ancient Latinum.
There is depth to this work that I think I will only discover upon re-reading it. And then there are depths that I think I will only discover after re-reading the Aenied. And there are still more depths that are hinted at, glimmers in the darkness, that I may never guess at unless I were to learn more Latin and read the Aeneid in Virgil's own language. That is why I call this novel "masterpiece." If I do not see its like again I will be satisfied to know that some measure of it will go on, as Lavinia has.
Arma reginamque cantat April 18, 2008
41 out of 42 found this review helpful
Read it.
I read about Le Guin's adaption of the second 6 books of the Aeneid in last Saturday's WSJ's Arts Section. She prepared by reading the entire epic in Latin.
This book is even more spare, more austere than most of her work, but it is not self-conscious or self-gratulatory about it. She has caught the "Old Roman" voice and understands the almost untranslatable words "pietas" and "nefas."
No English words do these concepts of moral and civic virtue as opposed to unspeakable wrong justice, and Le Guin both knows this and presents them as the ongoing moral struggles and examples they represent. She has also placed herself firmly in the grand tradition in which, Vergil, Dante's "il miglior fabbro" (sp) appears to her (and to her protagonist, the Italian princess who marries Aeneas) and explains, as he is floating in and out of life, what he was trying to do with his vision, in tribute to and in conflict with Augustus in a very different city indeed.
In the end, character enters into dialogue with poet: creator and created benefit from the experience. Because, as Lavinia says with no resentment, Vergil has failed to "breathe sufficient life" into her (she has not a single word of dialogue in the poem), she has not life enough to die like Dido (who really is an operatic character), but lives on, a quiet, eloquent voice of an intregrity that Rome lost, but never ceased to value.
Le Guin's prose is very different from the clangor of the dactylic hexameter epic line. It is brilliant, bravura, meant for battle and great deeds; Lavinia's quiet prose describes daily wonders and is wrought out of her service of her city, her family, and her altars -- a different sort of vocabulary, indeed. Both possess their own strengths.
And Le Guin now joins the artists who, in the Middle Ages, wrote within the Matter of Antiquity, which was, as a twelfth-century Frenchman said, wise.
He was right.
what a lovely book! April 17, 2008
26 out of 26 found this review helpful
This is the by far the best book I have read so far in 2008. It has lovely prose, and filled with intelligent writing and levels upon levels of meaning.
LeGuin is clearly inspired by the classic The Aeneid: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editio).
She tells the story of Aeneas and the Trojans coming to Italy through the point of view of the native Latin people, particularly through the eyes of their kind and intelligent princess, Lavinia, destined to become the second wife of the Trojan prince and leader Aeneas, and the mother of Rome.
The events of this story can be interpreted as a tragedy to the Latins - armed strangers come to their country, a war immediately breaks out, the leader of the strangers marries their princess (the only surviving child of their king), and their culture and destiny are changed forever. The Latins living through these happenings certainly do not realize that these events will someday lead to the Roman Empire.
Particularly well done (in a marvelously well written book) are the explorations of the relationship between creator and character - as in the scenes when Lavinia goes to the sacred springs of her family and receives visions of the poet Virgil. She is his character; he her creator. They are being granted visions of each other, separated as they are through hundreds of years and layers of myths and legend. Does he change reality to better fit his artistic visions? Who effects whom more - Lavinia or Virgil? Which comes first - character or creator?
 Disappointing April 6, 2008
14 out of 31 found this review helpful
I had great hopes for this book -- it's not often Le Guin publishes, and it's always an event. But although it is (of course) beautifully written, I found it boring to read, especially the middle section, and I found I was skipping over the pages because I wanted something to happen. As beautiful prose, this book is a success, but as a story, it sags under the weight of all the dreams and oracles.
Once Aeneas and Lavinia marry, the story picks up and carries all the way to the end. But by then you are 2/3 of the way through the book.
Not up to LeGuin's usual standards May 1, 2008
13 out of 16 found this review helpful
LeGuin had a great idea -- take the little written about Lavinia, the last wife of the Trojan hero Aeneas, in Vergil's epic poem The Aeneid and flesh it out into a story of pre-Rome Italy. With LeGuin's writing and Vergil as source material what wouldn't be great? Unfortunately, LeGuin seems constrained by the mythological elements in the story and the writing is ponderous and slow, in keeping with epic poetry perhaps, but not what you expect from LeGuin. As others have noted, the writing is beautiful but the story is slow. Even after removing the action of the gods from Vergil, everything is a bit too perfect. LeGuin takes the liberty of having Lavinia know that she has been created by Vergil, but it still would have been nice to be able to see Lavinia as a flesh and blood human being of pre-Roman Latium. The principal characters just don't come alive. Only the slaves and farmers, secondary characters here, seem real. Everyone else is the perfect hero or flawed anti-hero of myth, try as LeGuin does to make them seem real.
On the plus side LeGuin is great writer so you never feel like this is a complete waste of time, and you get to know the story of the Aeneid somewhat, of how after the fall of Troy Aeneas wandered through Africa and Sicily looking for a home for his people, and ended up in Italy, married to a princess of Latium. I didn't learn quite as much about the time and place as I'd have liked, but even though I was a bit disappointed, I'm still glad I read this.
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