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Counting the Stars (Hardcover)

by Helen Dunmore (Author) "This is how it begins ..." (more)
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 273 pages
  • Publisher: Fig Tree (7 Feb 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0670914541
  • ISBN-13: 978-0670914548
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 228,427 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #20 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > D > Dunmore, Helen

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Product Description

Book Description

Set in Rome under the rule of Caesar over one white hot summer, this is the mesmerizing love story between real life poet Catullus and his older married mistress, Clodia


Product Description

In the heat of Rome’s long summer, the poet Catullus and his older married lover, Clodia Metelli, meet in secret. Living at the heart of sophisticated, brittle and brutal Roman society at the time of Pompey, Crassus and Julius Caesar, Catullus is obsessed with Clodia, the Lesbia of his most passionate poems. He is jealous of her husband, of her maid, even of her pet sparrow. And Clodia? Catullus is ‘her dear poet’, but possibly not her only interest… Their Rome is a city of extremes. Tenants are packed into ramshackle apartment blocks while palatial villas house the magnificence of the families who control Rome. Armed street gangs clash in struggles for political power. Slaves are the eyes and ears of everything that goes on, while civilization and violence are equals, murder is the easy option and poison the weapon of choice. Catallus’ relationship with Clodia is one of the most intense, passionate, tormented and candid in history. In love and in hate, their story exposes the beauty and terrors of Roman life in the late Republic.
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Customer Reviews

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3.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars classically intriguing, 23 Mar 2008
By A. Craig "Amanda Craig" (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
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.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read, 14 Jul 2008
By S. Brookes "Nice Irma" (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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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3.0 out of 5 stars Emotionally stale and flat, 15 April 2009
By Roman Clodia (London) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
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.
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