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Summary
Summary
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 thelove 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.
Author Notes
Ursula K. Le Guin was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California on October 21, 1929. She received a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1951 and a master's degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia University in 1952. She won a Fulbright fellowship in 1953 to study in Paris, where she met and married Charles Le Guin.
Her first science-fiction novel, Rocannon's World, was published in 1966. Her other books included the Earthsea series, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, The Lathe of Heaven, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and The Telling. A Wizard of Earthsea received an American Library Association Notable Book citation, a Horn Book Honor List citation, and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1979. She received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. She also received the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award. She also wrote books of poetry, short stories collections, collections of essays, children's books, a guide for writers, and volumes of translation including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by Gabriela Mistral. She died on January 22, 2018 at the age of 88.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the Aeneid, the only notable lines Virgil devotes to Aeneas' second wife, Lavinia, concern an omen: the day before Aeneus lands in Latinum, Lavinia's hair is veiled by a ghost fire, presaging war. Le Guin's masterful novel gives a voice to Lavinia, the daughter of King Latinus and Queen Amata, who rule Latinum in the era before the founding of Rome. Amata lost her sons to a childhood sickness and has since become slightly mad. She is fixated on marrying Lavinia to Amata's nephew, Turnus, the king of neighboring Rutuli. It's a good match, and Turnus is handsome, but Lavinia is reluctant. Following the words of an oracle, King Latinus announces that Lavinia will marry Aeneas, a newly landed stranger from Troy; the news provokes Amata, the farmers of Latinum, and Turnus, who starts a civil war. Le Guin is famous for creating alternative worlds (as in Left Hand of Darkness), and she approaches Lavinia's world, from which Western civilization took its course, as unique and strange as any fantasy. It's a novel that deserves to be ranked with Robert Graves's I, Claudius. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Fantasist and SF writer Le Guin turns her attention and her considerable talent to fleshing out a secondary character mentioned briefly in Virgil's masterpiece, The Aeneid. Though Aeneas risks inciting a civil war as he fights to win her hand in marriage, despite the fact that she is promised to another, more politically expedient suitor, Lavinia herself remains strangely mute and is given no scope in the epic poem. Here, as Le Guin reworks the story, Lavinia evolves into a true woman of destiny, eventually forging a strong partnership with the legendary founder of Rome. The compulsively readable Le Guin earns kudos for fashioning a winning combination of history and mythology featuring an unlikely heroine imaginatively plucked from literary obscurity.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2008 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-This novel takes a minor character from Vergil's Aeneid and creates a thoughtful, moving tale of prophecy, myth, and self-fulfillment. Lavinia is the teen princess of Latium, a small but important kingdom in pre-Roman Italy. As she moves into womanhood, she feels pressure from her parents to choose one of her many suitors as both her husband and the future ruler of the kingdom. But the oracles of the sacred springs say she will marry an unknown foreigner. This stranger is none other than Vergil's Aeneus, proud hero, king without a country, and the man who will lay down the foundations of the Roman Empire. Their marriage sparks a war to control the region; while readers don't see the glorious battles, they do get the surprisingly moving perspective of the home front through Lavinia's eyes. Best known for her works of fantasy, Le Guin takes a more historical approach here by toning down the magical elements; gods and prophecies have a vital role in the protagonist's life, but they are presented as concepts and rituals, not as deities playing petty games with the lives of mortals. This shifts the focus of Vergil's plot from action to character, allowing Le Guin to breathe life into a character who never utters a word in the original story. Lavinia is quite compelling as she transforms from a spirited princess into a queen full of wisdom who makes a profound impact on her people. The author's language and style are complex, making this a title for sophisticated teens.-Matthew L. Moffett, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
When the Roman poet Virgil was commissioned to write a national epic poem by Augustus, it was an obvious - though astoundingly ambitious - idea to make the greatest works of antiquity, the Iliad and the Odyssey, his models. The Aeneid, which Virgil left unfinished at his death in 19BC, took Aeneas, a bit-part player from the Iliad , and gave him a starring role. Aeneas's most striking moment in the Iliad involves his being magically whisked away to safety by his mother, the goddess Aphrodite, from a sticky moment on the battlefield - not a particularly edifying episode. Virgil, on the other hand, gave him a whole 12-book poem, detailing his thrilling journey across the Mediterranean from the ashes of Troy to his new home, and the bloody conflict that breaks loose in Italy, where he founds a colony. The poet pumped blood through the veins of Homer's minimal character, made him fall in love, gave him agonies of conscience, awed him with intimations of Rome's future greatness, made him fearful, joyful, bloodthirsty, religious, fatherly. Ursula Le Guin has pulled off a similar trick with the Aeneid. She has taken a minor, even bloodless character from that poem, and breathed life into her. In Virgil, Lavinia is the daughter of Latinus, king of Laurentum in Italy. Latinus has received a prophecy instructing him that Lavinia must be married to a foreigner. The thoroughly foreign Aeneas turns up, but Lavinia's mother Amata, egged on by the angry goddess Juno, is determined that the girl be married to Turnus, a local suitor. War breaks out between the rival parties, ending only with the pitiless slaughter of the defeated Turnus by Aeneas. Lavinia, as the cause of the war, is thus a Virgilian version of Homer's Helen. But instead of being imbued with Helen's self-confidence, or even with her uncanny beauty, Lavinia is a mere shadow. She never speaks. She has only a handful of appearances: once as the subject of a curious portent, when her hair bursts into flames during a religious ceremony; once as the subject of a peculiar and troubling simile, when her scarlet blush associates her with warfare and bloodshed. It is as if Virgil had room for only one love affair for Aeneas, when he falls for the immeasurably glamorous Dido. In Le Guin's Lavinia , by contrast, the princess of Laurentum takes centre stage. The utterly convincing world that Le Guin creates, in her crisp, delicately flavoured, perfectly unfussed prose, is a homespun one. This is a simple agricultural society, dominated by the rhythms of the seasons. She has Lavinia tell us: "I've never ploughed, but I've watched our farmers at it all my life: the white ox trudging forward in the yoke, the man gripping with long wood handles that buck and rear as he tries to force the ploughshare through the soil that looks so meek and ready and is so tough, so shut." Le Guin does not marshal, as does Virgil, the gods as active characters; instead she gives her characters a rough, homely religion that honours the spirits of hearth and hill. It is a hideous shock when war strikes this gentle, pacific society. Some may find Le Guin's world a little artificial: Lavinia has a certain self-awareness as a literary creation, a character who owes her existence to the imaginative inner life of Virgil, but also comes and goes in some realm outside his direct grasp. But, for this reader at least, Le Guin pulls it off, gently reminding us how all readers are creators, in their way, shading in and colour-washing the sometimes faint outlines proffered by poets. Le Guin is certainly a marvellous reader of the Aeneid , and a generous one. Try as I might, I have never managed to square "pious Aeneas" - the dutiful, gods-fearing prince - with the rampaging berserker who buries his sword in his enemy's breast in anger, even when Turnus is downed, defeated and begging for mercy. Le Guin makes sense of him in her subtly moving, playful, tactfully told story, a novel that brought me to tears more than once. Lavinia is a delightful heroine: pragmatic, sensible, gentle, courageous. Virgil would never have written her: she is a modern projection of a modern intelligence and sensibility. But it is very much to Le Guin's credit that her Lavinia never strikes a false note. Charlotte Higgins's It's All Greek to Me is published by Short Books. Caption: article-higginsleguin900.1 In [Ursula Le Guin]'s [Lavinia] , by contrast, the princess of Laurentum takes centre stage. The utterly convincing world that Le Guin creates, in her crisp, delicately flavoured, perfectly unfussed prose, is a homespun one. This is a simple agricultural society, dominated by the rhythms of the seasons. She has Lavinia tell us: "I've never ploughed, but I've watched our farmers at it all my life: the white ox trudging forward in the yoke, the man gripping with long wood handles that buck and rear as he tries to force the ploughshare through the soil that looks so meek and ready and is so tough, so shut." Le Guin does not marshal, as does [Virgil], the gods as active characters; instead she gives her characters a rough, homely religion that honours the spirits of hearth and hill. It is a hideous shock when war strikes this gentle, pacific society. - Charlotte Higgins.
Library Journal Review
She was a minor character in The Aeneid, a "silent, shrinking maiden," but in Le Guin's brilliant reimagining of the last six books of Virgil's epic poem, Lavinia, the Latin king's daughter with whom the Trojan hero Aeneas founds the Roman Empire, finds her voice and springs fully to life. Protesting the Roman poet's dull, conventional portrait of her-"He slighted my life in his poem"-Lavinia takes us back to a Bronze Age Italy inhabited by Latin-speaking tribes. Under the rule of her father, the kingdom of Latinus is at peace until Lavinia turns 18 and the suitors arrive. Her mother Amata wants her daughter to marry her handsome, ambitious nephew, Turnus, but Lavinia is reluctant. Like her father, she can commune with the sacred spirits and in a memorable dreamlike scene meets the dying Virgil, who tells her Aeneas's story and her role in his life. Thus armed, Lavania resists her mother's will and decides to make her own destiny when early one morning the Trojan black ships sail up the Tiber River. As Le Guin's afterword acknowledges, this beautiful and moving novel is a love offering to one of the world's great poets, and former high-school Latin scholars may return to Virgil with a renewed appreciation. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/07; for another interpretation of The Aeneid, see Jo Graham's Black Ships, LJ 2/15/08.-Ed.]-Wilda Williams, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
