Product Description

In the sticky summer heat unruly desires stir the blood . . . For Catullus, the brilliantly witty and outrageous young poet, and Clodia, his older, married lover, a borrowed villa in Rome is a secret, illicit meeting-place. When they are apart, Catullus burns with desire for 'his girl’, while Clodia goes her own way among his rivals. Other passions simmer in the heat: the streets threaten to erupt in political violence, hearts sour and contemplate murder, and love and hate are dangerously entwined. Catullus' jealousy grows as toxic as hellebore or hemlock. Poisoning is a Roman art, and there is poison everywhere ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112212 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Helen Dunmore has published ten novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby; House of Orphans and Counting the Stars. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer.

Customer Reviews

Dunmore fan sorely let down
I think perhaps my title says it all. One of my all time favorite novels is by Dunmore (Thie Siege), and I am very fond of at least half of the rest of her output. But this! I have a classical education myself so I can't say I am alienated by her subject, but in this novel the reader remains completely alienated by all of the characters - they are hollow and cold. Dunmore shows her usual good control of language, but it doesn't lift off the ground in this one. She doesn't succeed in creating an atmosphere - at which she normally truly excels. You don't care whether the main characters live or die, love or hate, laugh or cry. What a shame. But I'm enough of a Dunmore enthusiast to look forward to her next novel, and let this be "just one of those things". You can't win every time, apparently.

Disappointing
Helen Dunmore is one of my favourite writers, but I found Counting the Stars rather unconvincing and lacking depth and insight. Some of the language also felt clumsy and jarring.

Emotionally flat and disappointing
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 `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.