Product Description

'Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate. The man was famous, the fate obscure; not a bad balance.' Lavinia is the daughter of the King of Latium, a victorious warrior who loves peace; she is her father's closest companion. Now of an age to wed, Lavinia's mother favours her own kinsman, King Turnus of Rutulia, handsome, heroic, everything a young girl should want. Instead, Lavinia dreams of mighty Aeneas, a man she has heard of only from a ghost of a poet, who comes to her in the gods' holy place and tells her of her future, and Aeneas' past . . . If she refuses to wed Turnus, Lavinia knows she will start a war - but her fate was set the moment the poet appeared to her in a dream and told her of the adventurer who fled fallen Troy, holding his son's hand and carrying his father on his back.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12370 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Review
"A magnificent act of reimagination, best read alongside a good translation of Virgil (such as that of Robert Fagles, whose translation is quoted here) so that Le Guin's brilliant interweaving of Lavinia's story with the original can be fully appreciated." (THE TIMES )

"A world rich in ritual and piety is evoked, one teeming with divine omens and auguries. It's beautifully done. [An] intruiging, luxuriously realised novel." (James Lovegrove THE FINANCIAL TIMES )

"Ursula Le Guin's vivid novel gives Lavinia a voice. It is a moving testament to the conversations that great writers sustain through the centuries." (Dinah Birch TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT )

"Lavinia is a fantasy built on a fantasy, yet it rings true. Its author writes with a sophistication and clarity that make suspension of disbelief natural. Le Guin's ancient Latium is extraordinary, as is Virgil's, but her characters are rooted, real, ordinary." (THE OBSERVER )

"This is a book that is as perfect as an autumn day or a truly great wine. This is life itself, coaxed onto the page. Such a perfect balance of feeling, metre and storytelling it is hard to describe." (Guy Haley DEATHRAY )

"Lavina is based on events in Virgil's Aeneid; the battle scenes do recall the film 300 or the epics of antiquity. But it's everyday pre-Roman life that fascinates Le Guin: rituals seasonal cycles and the role of women. Lavinia herself has a strong voice, and Le Guin's lyrical prose builds a heroic love story." (WATERSTONE'S BOOKS QUARTERLY )

"Le Guin has lovingly re-created the relatively simple Bronze age culture that ultimately gave birth to Rome. This is one of her finest achievements. It certainly deserves to be at the top of your 'must read' list." (Laurence Osborn INTERZONE )

"If you enjoyed Virgil's Aeneid, you will enjoy seeing that one line fleshed out. If you like classical history, this is a fascinating glimpse of the little warrior states that eventually became part of Rome. For those who like poetic prose, a good story well told, and living through a different mind in another world, then Lavinia will be a book to enjoy again and again." (HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY )

"Lavinia opens a thought provoking window into a long dead world, and offers something interesting from the hands of a writer who is extremely competent and passionately engaged with her subject matter. A fascinating read." (Alex Meehan SUNDAY BUSINESS POST (IRELAND) )

"Impressively written and deftly handled, this is a graceful and enchanting novel that far from marring the legend Virgil created, delicately adds to it in a modest commentary on a character he left undone. Beautifully crafted and skillfully tackled." (DREAMWATCH TOTAL SCI FI )

"Le Guin is a composed writer, clear and measured, and her account of the life of Aeneas's last wife, a woman Virgil scoots over in the The Aeneid, is captivating. This is a work of passion, written with cool expertise: a cracker." (THE SUNDAY TIMES )

About the Author
Ursula Le Guin has won many awards, including a National Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Newbery Honor and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.

Customer Reviews

Above and beyond a retelling of an old story
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.

"And war and glory followed her"
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.

Wonderful evocation of the world of the Aeneid
This has sent me back to those parts of the Aeneid that I used to skip. Ursula Le Guin has brought them to life in a most fascinating and vivid way. She has managed to turn Aeneas, previously considered rather a boringly 'pious' hero, into someone who could be both a good fighter and a good king and someone whose past tragedies did not prevent him from being optimistic about the future. It is often difficult to depict 'good' characters vividly, but she manages it with Lavinia and Aeneas.

The author clearly shows that, despite the attention given to wars and kings in chronicles and epics, they were really on the periphery of human life. Most people most of the time were only concerned with their farms and their families. I am also impressed by the way she dealt with the problem of the epic gods and goddeses interfering with human lives - something that has not been done convincingly since Homer. The dialogue between Lavinia and the poet over this matter maintains a role for the divine in everyday life without having to trip over personifications of it. That may well be closer to the original Indo-European beliefs anyway.

I am most impressed by this book as both a historical novel and a commentary on Virgil.