|
Title: Lavinia
Purchase
Item
Manufacturer: Harcourt
List Price: $24.00
Our Price: $14.79
|
|
| Customer Reviews: |
| Lavinia by Harcourt A wonderful story with engaging characters | 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 | | Lavinia by Harcourt Elegant, spare, rich | | 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. | | Lavinia by Harcourt great! | | I loved this book. Ordered it overnight so I could have it to read the evening my husband went out of town. I didn't get to sleep until late that night because I stayed up to finish this wonderful book! It did just what I wanted and took me away! | | Lavinia by Harcourt Not up to LeGuin's usual standards | 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. | | Lavinia by Harcourt more than a historical novel | I have enjoyed LeGuin since I was 14 and read "Wizard of Earthsea". She has always been able to write the most splendidly imaginative science fiction ("Left Hand of Darkness") or fantasy- that always ends up being about the mysteries of the human heart instead of the time and place that she has invented.
She has never lost this ability, and it shines in "Lavinia". But I think I have enjoyed this one in a special way, because of the literary added value she gets from the ghost of dying Virgil, and Lavinia being both a real person and a literary construct in the story. This is very memorable and rewarding stuff, haunting really. Bottom line, LeGuin is not just someone who can craft sf, fantasy, or historical fiction with equal flair. She brings poetry to prose with her wonderful judgment of the perfect scene, the perfect word. I cannot imagine doing this at age 78, and reading the Aeneid in Latin just to do a better job. She is unbelievable. I kneel before her. | | Lavinia by Harcourt Product Description | 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 in the poem. 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 make her own destiny, and she tells us what Vergil did not: the story of her life, and of the love of her life. Lavinia is a book of love and war, generous and austerely beautiful, from a writer working at the height of her powers. |
No item elements found in rss feed.
|
