Transcendent, Fascinating, Imaginary, Wonderful

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	• Lavinia Ursula K. Le Guin Harcourt, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A good read

LeGuin does it again. I always enjoyed her Earthsea books and this is a little different but just as good. Lavinia is an interesting woman with a good story to tell. Way to go, Ursula (I can call her that because we're about the same age).

Lost In Time, Lost Track Of Time

Last night I intended to read LAVINIA for about 30 minutes, then turn the lights out at about midnight. The next time I looked at the clock it was 2 AM! I'd been transported.

Need I say more? Is there any higher praise?

If you are an Ursula Le Guin fan, this is a wondrous new journey. New to Le Guin? Prepare to be amazed.

Kirtland Peterson

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The Laviniad carries the torch

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."

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Le Guin's best book yet

By turns lambent and stark, no-nonsense and achingly lyrical, Le Guin's Lavinia is a finely-crafted gem of a novel. Neither historical fiction nor fantasy, it occupies the fascinating intersection of the imaginary (numinous landscapes and time-traveling ghosts), the literary (characters and events drawn from Vergil's Aeneid), and the real (a plausible, semi-historical Italian bronze-age agricultural society).

All this sounds very tricksy and post-modern, but the feel of the novel is spare, simple, and deeply-felt, like all of Le Guin's best work. Familiarity with the Aeneid undoubtedly adds to the reader's experience, but the device of having Vergil appear in the novel to retell segments of his epic makes this optional rather than necessary. (In a few short passages, Le Guin does a wonderful job of conveying the characteristic mix of beauty, brutality, and psychological acuity that makes Vergil's story-telling so compelling.)

Rescuing Lavinia from literary obscurity and providing her with the voice (and personality) Vergil omitted turns out to provide Le Guin with a perfect outlet for her novelistic gifts. She has always been adept at creating alternative societies that incorporate magical elements, and here she does an incredible job of making one small corner of bronze-age Italy come numinously alive. With effortless skill, she summons up a simple, pious religious culture centered around omens and the ritual of sacrifice, with a rich round of household and agricultural activities and well-drawn social institutions. Wisely, she jettisons the Olympian pantheon that Vergil manipulated so dazzlingly and to such ambiguous effect in the Aeneid and makes the Italian worldview a homelier one tied to the land.

But what makes this novel so impressive is how fully and affectingly the character of Lavinia is drawn, and how convincingly she inhabits the fascinating socio-cultural matrix Le Guin has created. Le Guin resists the temptation to cast Lavinia either as an unsung feminist hero or a tragic victim of historical forces or male oppression. Instead, we see her grow from a vulnerable girl into a confident queen and force to be reckoned with, but she never loses her humility, chooses her battles carefully, and is always willing to work from the sidelines when confrontation will achieve nothing or endanger critical, cherished goals. She is attuned both to the will of the local deities and the welfare of her people, essentially living a life of service. (She is thus the perfect female counterpart to "pious" Aeneas.) Despite her devotion to duty, however, she is a fully-rounded character who both suffers terribly and achieves moments of intense personal happiness. There is a beautiful sense of balance in this book between the personal and the collective, the quotidian and the sacred, the fixed anchor of the lived moment and the grand sweep of history.

Within the world of the story, Lavinia sees herself as marginal, "contingent," but Le Guin gives readers plenty of material for an alternative assessment. This is one of those rare books (like Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock) that quietly but powerfully turns our priorities upside down and reveals the centrality of the "marginal" and the vital importance of the historically "contingent." Nuanced, assured, and deeply humane, this is Le Guin's best book yet.

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Transcendent, Fascinating, Imaginary, Wonderful

As soon as I finished this marvelous story, I immediately read it again. Then I looked up all I could find about the Trojan War, The Aeneid, and early Roman history. Then I read it again. This is a charming, well crafted story. Very simple on the surface, but with layers and layers of color, emotion, meaning and personality. LeGuinn invents a brilliant device linking the spirit of the poet Virgil with a minor character from the Aeneid to develop the story from several viewpoints and timeframes all at once. Genius. She creates an intriguing and warming tale of heroes, loyalty, oracles, fate and virtue. She presents a fascinating world of pre-Roman Italy in exquisite detail. In my opinion the finest work of LeGuinn's complex and varied oeuvre. Highly recommended for literate readers.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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.

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