- Paperback
- Publisher: ISIS Large Print Books; Large type edition edition (1 Aug 2009)
- ISBN-10: 0753181851
- ISBN-13: 978-0753181850
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
Counting the Stars
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Product Description
From the Inside Flap
'She reels you in with a return to the seductive, flowing prose that has made all her novels...so memorable...Dunmore has a gift for turning every genre she touches to gold...a captivating tale of forbidden love with a bittersweet finale' Telegraph
`Dunmore at her most innovative and daring...a powerful and convincing study of fame and notoriety...captivating and compelling' Time Out
`Compelling...Dunmore's strengths as a novelist have always included her skill in sensuous description and her ability to convey the promises and the dangers of erotic love. The Rome she has so vividly realised in Counting the Stars provides a new stage on which to display those strengths' Sunday Times --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
Surely Rome is enough to fill a life, if he can just get free of this obsession that has robbed everything of meaning except itself.
But she'll always be there. He won't be able to escape her. Even if he can stop meeting her he'll never be able to avoid hearing about her. Their circle is too small an island in the sea of Rome. Her name will follow him everywhere. She's in his blood...
Clodia, I'm talking to you. Listen. Love and hate, that's what I feel for you, love and hate so fused together that I can't drag one from the arms of the other. You want to know how that's possible? You say it doesn't make sense? You're right. There is no sense left in me: only sensation. Feeling tears me apart.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Everyone who has done A-level Latin has probably been intrigued by Catullus, and his passionate affair with "Lesbia", an older married woman, immortalised in some of the best poetry ever written about love. Like Shakespeare's Sonnets they tell a story which is that of everyone who has ever felt seared by love, and loss, but which is also tantalisingly individual and modern. Dunmore imagines the progress of the affair, from the time when Catullus and the rich, spoilt Clodia (probably the real-life Lesbia) make love in the villa of his friend Manlius, through to when he returns to Rome after his brother's death in Bithynia and realises the affair is over. Interwoven with this is a kind of detective story as Catullus discovers that Clodia may have poisoned her husband. A dull upstanding Senator very different from the glamorous, witty, sophisticated circle Caullus inhabits, he is blamed for the death of Lesbia's famous sparrow.
Dunmore has always excelled at haunting, lyrical descriptions of doomed passion in which the central protagonist is doomed or deceived. There are two striking things about this new novelhowever. One is that it has a male point of view throughout. The other is that it is often very funny. As a noted poet herself, she probably puts a lot of her own frustrations at bores and philistines into C's mind; Clodia's leaden husband is allowed more dignity and sympathy in the end but makes a good foil. She also allows us to sympathise with Clodia/Lesbia, especially in her choice not to remarry. What fate could a Roman girl have but to be married off at 14? If Clodia is puzzlingly sex-mad, maybe it's the only sphere in which she can achieve some autonomy.
Ultimately, this isn't quite as good as her best novels, The Siege and Talking to the Dead in terms of narrative control and satisfaction. It's a more internalised drama, without the shocks and surprises that make her earlier work particularly satisfying. However, it's one of her best historical novels, a hugely impressive work of imagination and research. A pleasure to read, it will stay in your mind long after the end.
Dunmore has always excelled at haunting, lyrical descriptions of doomed passion in which the central protagonist is doomed or deceived. There are two striking things about this new novelhowever. One is that it has a male point of view throughout. The other is that it is often very funny. As a noted poet herself, she probably puts a lot of her own frustrations at bores and philistines into C's mind; Clodia's leaden husband is allowed more dignity and sympathy in the end but makes a good foil. She also allows us to sympathise with Clodia/Lesbia, especially in her choice not to remarry. What fate could a Roman girl have but to be married off at 14? If Clodia is puzzlingly sex-mad, maybe it's the only sphere in which she can achieve some autonomy.
Ultimately, this isn't quite as good as her best novels, The Siege and Talking to the Dead in terms of narrative control and satisfaction. It's a more internalised drama, without the shocks and surprises that make her earlier work particularly satisfying. However, it's one of her best historical novels, a hugely impressive work of imagination and research. A pleasure to read, it will stay in your mind long after the end.
Format:Hardcover
Catullus, a poet writing in C1st Rome bce, the Rome of Cicero and Julius Caesar, is perhaps now best known for his searing poems written to `Lesbia', possibly the aristocratic married woman Clodia Metelli. Dunsmore takes this scenario very literally and spins a story that fills out the gaps in Catullus' own poems. Love, death, obsessive erotic passion, poisoning, possible incest and political corruption: this ought to be a story boiling over with emotion, but somehow it feels emotionally flat, both too sensationalist and yet too mundane at the same time.
Dunsmore writes in an odd kind of half-historical style: some of it is completely contemporary so that Catullus talks about his `career options', people imagine going to heaven (in pre-Christian Rome?), people talking to and about slaves as if they are social acquaintances. Yet, on the other hand, she stresses the alieness of Roman culture, particularly around a funeral scene. Sadly, for me, neither style worked, and the book ended up being un-atmospheric to an extreme.
I also found Dunsmore's extremely literal reading of Catullus' poetry very limiting, as if the only source for poetry is always and unquestionably the autobiographical, with no room for creative imagination at all. Apart from being an unsophisticated reading, it made the whole book far too predictable to anyone familiar with the poetry itself.
There have been other attempts to novelise the Catullus/Lesbia story (Clodia, The Venus Throw, The Ides of March ) but this is the first time it has been written by a woman. However Dunsmore doesn't succeed, in my view, in making Clodia any more a coherent `real' woman than any of her male writers.
So overall I found this a disappointingly slight book that gestures towards something deeply emotional but fails to deliver.
Dunsmore writes in an odd kind of half-historical style: some of it is completely contemporary so that Catullus talks about his `career options', people imagine going to heaven (in pre-Christian Rome?), people talking to and about slaves as if they are social acquaintances. Yet, on the other hand, she stresses the alieness of Roman culture, particularly around a funeral scene. Sadly, for me, neither style worked, and the book ended up being un-atmospheric to an extreme.
I also found Dunsmore's extremely literal reading of Catullus' poetry very limiting, as if the only source for poetry is always and unquestionably the autobiographical, with no room for creative imagination at all. Apart from being an unsophisticated reading, it made the whole book far too predictable to anyone familiar with the poetry itself.
There have been other attempts to novelise the Catullus/Lesbia story (Clodia, The Venus Throw, The Ides of March ) but this is the first time it has been written by a woman. However Dunsmore doesn't succeed, in my view, in making Clodia any more a coherent `real' woman than any of her male writers.
So overall I found this a disappointingly slight book that gestures towards something deeply emotional but fails to deliver.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I've enjoyed all Helen Dunmore's books to date - including the children's books, and I liked 'Counting the Stars' too. This book was beautifully written and full of brooding emotion like all her storytelling, however, the plot didn't really grab me and there was a chapter or two in the middle I was tempted to skip. Still, a fascinating read if you like a story set in classical Rome and are a fan of Helen Dunmore's work.
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