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 enlarge | Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $11.51
You Save: $12.49 (52%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 12942
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0151014248
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780151014248
ASIN: 0151014248
Publication Date: April 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Lavinia July 3, 2008
This is a wonderful adventure. A womans view of life, love, marriage and war. Ursula LeGuin give a voice to a character not previously heard from.
Mythic tale of Rome's founding June 27, 2008
Made immortal by Virgil in his epic, "The Aeneid," Lavinia never gets to speak a word in the poem. Though her destined marriage to Trojan Aeneus is the beginning of the Roman people and its ancient connection with Troy, Lavinia remains a silent symbol.
"He gave me a long life but a small one. I need room, I need air," she says early on in Le Guin's novel.
And Le Guin gives it to her. Lavinia's narration is self-aware and mythic. "No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may be so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her."
But Lavinia's story is also passionate and full of earthy, daily details. She is both centuries-old legend and flesh-and-blood woman.
She is the daughter of a substantial rural king, Latinus of Latium. Her mother, once a sunny woman, has been driven mad with grief over the death of her sons and begrudges the life of her healthy daughter. As Lavinia reaches marriageable age, suitors come calling.
Her mother favors one of the neighboring kings, lusty, ambitious Turnus, and Lavinia blushes and stammers in his company. But Lavinia also propitiates the gods at the sacred springs where she bows to the prophecy that she will marry a foreigner and become the cause of a bitter war in order to found the beginnings of a great empire. When Aeneus' ships arrive, she recognizes her destiny.
On the banks of the sacred springs the 19-year-old Lavinia also communes with the spirit of the dying poet, Virgil, who laments that he did not know her better before he died (some scholars say Virgil died before completing the epic, which would have included more about Lavinia, or at least Aeneus' marriage to her).
Winner of numerous awards for her fantasy novels, Le Guin reimagines history with as vivid an eye as she creates worlds of fantasy. From the market towns and poorer realms around Latinus to the details of plowing, herding, gathering precious salt from beds by the sea, the spelt meal and goat's milk of daily meals and the golden goblets of banquets - Le Guin creates a bustling, lively world.
But while Lavinia spins wool and gathers sacred salt and runs in the creek with her friends, she also willingly embodies destiny and legend. Beautifully written, Le Guin's novel will appeal to her legions of fans as well as fans of Steven Saylor's "Roma."
 Life in magic, myth and fate June 22, 2008
Ursula LeGuin's novel extends The Aeneid, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC. Virgil was writing a founding myth of Rome, where the Trojan hero Aeneas, after many adventures in Cathage, Sicily and the underworld, arrives in Latium, near the eventual site of Rome. There he engages in warfare with the indigent clans and victorious, marries the local princess Lavinia to found the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
LeGuin's Aeneas is a Taoist ideal, the artisan attuned to the Way in its Augustan form as pietas, honour and duty. He contends with those overmastered by passions: King Turnus, who he kills (murders?) at the end of the Aeneid, and his own flawed son, Ascanius. Lavinia, a cipher in Virgil's poem, becomes a person in LeGuin's hands, but also an archetype: the owl of Minerva.
Other reviews here properly convey what a fine piece of writing this is. It works as history, a vivid picture of bronze-age life, and as a retelling of the last six books of the Aeneid. Lavinia lives her life, from small girl to her eventual destiny, in the immanent presence of magic, myth and fate. LeGuin ensures that the reader does too.
Note: it reminded me a little of "The Way of Wyrd" by Professor Brian Bates, which recreates the celtic 'life in magic' in dark ages Britain.
Transcendent, Fascinating, Imaginary, Wonderful June 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Le Guin's best book yet May 30, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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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