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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Above and beyond a retelling of an old story, 22 May 2008
Maria Bello's character in "The Jane Austen Book Club" reads Ursula Le Guin and is completely taken with the books, and knowing nothing of Le Guin, I found it necessary to right that fact.
"Lavinia" is the untold story of Vergil's silent Lavinia in "Aeneide". An oracle prophecises that she, a Latin king's daughter, will marry a foreigner and be the cause of a war. In Vergil's version she never speaks and is in every way a background character. In Le Guin's "Lavinia" Lavinia is the narrator.
Lavinia is the daughter of King Latium, who is the cause of a war between Turnus and Aeneas and who marries Aeneas - "Lavinia" is the story of this. "Lavinia" is also a dialogue between Le Guin (through Lavinia) with the poet a.k.a. Vergil about Lavinia's character in "Aeneide" and the "Aeneide's" perhaps unfinished state. And this is the part, which in my opinion, makes Le Guin's "Lavinia" soar.
Le Guin easily moves around the fact, that "Lavinia" is a known story retold, as she lets Vergil tell Lavinia the story of the "Aeneide", partly because of the narrative skill and voice of Lavinia. Lavinia - as the reader - has a firm inkling of what will happen. The war. Lavinia marrying Aeneas. Aeneas' death. And Le Guin still enchants the reader with this story.
"Lavinia" is above and beyond a retelling of an old story. It truly gives an old story new voice and new life. Le Guin's writing and storytelling craftmanship is extraordinary. Almost 5 stars.
Louise.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"And war and glory followed her", 12 Aug 2008
For Lavinia, the heroine of this novel, for a long time, love, or the possibility of it seems lost until she meets Aeneus, the handsome and virile Trojan hero, a foreigner from the other side of the world who sails up the Tiber into a country that will soon become Italy and whom Lavinia is eventually fated to marry. A fully independent spirit and a king's daughter, Lavinia is also a marriageable virgin, obedient and ready to a man's will.
We first meet Lavinia living a charmed and mercurial existence, keeping the storerooms of the Kings house while she frolics in the meadows of Latium with her best friend Silvia. Lavinia's ageing father Latinus is devoted to her and she provides a solace for him, but her mother, Amata harbors a bitter resentment towards her daughter after illness claimed the lives of Lavinia's two infant brothers. For years Lavinia has gotten by without the love of her mother, a woman who has buried herself in the crimp of loathing and a type of desolate scornful fury.
Fuelled by grief Amata, wild with her manner and imperious, while also willful and hot-tempered sees a match with her nephew, the splendidly handsome blue-eyed Rutulian King Turnus who arrives, well-made and muscular, young man with rife with "hot blood running through his veins." Already wooed and won by him with his tales of exploits, and triumphs and skirmishes, Amata fanatically pressures for a marriage even as Lavinia becomes a shrinking silent maiden. Lavinia readily admits that she hadn't given any thought to love and marriage for "my realm was virginity and I was at home in it." Feeling false, frightened, incredulous, scornful and alone with her mother silently turning her rage against her, Lavinia's marriage to Turnus seems inevitable, "to accept another suitor would be to bring civil war to the Kingdom." Turnus has to win and be the master and he would never let another man have woman he had claimed.
But then in a sacred pace, where the stinking sulfur water comes up from under the earth to make pools on the earth, a wraith appears in the form of a dying man who had not yet been born and who knows about Lavinia's past and her future. As he buries deep into her soul he tells Lavinia of the prophecy that a man is coming and that she would marry a true hero. The man is Aeneus, but he is no ordinary man having led his people for seven years across the land and sea. Now he is bringing his gods with him, and guided by omens and oracles, he is destined to rule the whole country and to found a glorious everlasting empire.
But Lavinia also learns of another prophecy, of a great city that lies in ruins, utterly destroyed and burned, the earth itself burned with "black oily clouds," and that her beloved Aeneas must die only after three years and widow her. Yet it is in this sacred world, full of gods, and portents of great powers and presences that Lavinia faces her most difficult choice: being loyal to her true love, the hero or the poet, her husband, the beautiful man whose flesh her flesh encloses, or listening to the other: a whisper in the shadows, a virgin's dream or vision, yet the author of all her being. Thrown into a fuming pot of petty feuds, both Lavinia and Aeneus find themselves at the mercy of the machinations of Amata and Turnus, both hero and heroine caught up in an epic battle and quickly embroiled in a clash of Turnus' own ambitions to rule and his desire to be with the woman who will cement his power.
Of course the final epic battle is drenched in blood and the sweat of Etruscans, Greeks and Trojans with armies of men with their swords rising and falling, the horrible noise of soldiers screaming even as both Aeneas and Turnus try to match their strength to the bitter and bloody end. Le Guinn paints these scenes with a type of hellish and heroic grandeur complete with battlement sieges, slaughter and rape, slave-taking, towns burning, and also men who rant and boast and then kill more men. In the end, the fury of bloodlust is overcome in battle, turning Aeneas reluctantly into a mindless indiscriminate slaughterer.
Even when the delicate truce is broken, the poor Lavinia must still follow her fate as the poet had told it. With bees that writhe in a cloud of smoke, humming and droning, Lavinia's blazing hair, scattering parks and smoke, and Aeneas' shield with its mysterious foreshadowing of mighty buildings and endless wars, the fates in this novel continually spin out their measured thread of what was to be. Holding fast to Virgil's own epic poem of the Trojan warrior, this book is awash in myth and legend and delivers some powerful messages about the nature of honor, heroism, loyalty and love. Mike Leonard August 08.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
languorous and moving, 4 Jul 2009
I'm used to the fast-moving plots of children's books and found parts of this too wordy and slow, but other sections were beautiful and moving, so it's worth persisting if you're a fan of Roman history, Virgil's Aeneid, or both. Although one or two words seemed anachronistic and jerked me out of the story, most of the narration strikes the perfect balance of restrained but compelling. Le Guin has done her research, too; I particularly liked her descriptions of gathering salt at the mouth of the Tiber; of carding, spinning and weaving; of offering sacrifice; and of the flora and fauna of Latium three millennia ago.
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