Lavinia

Le Guin enchants you immediately, as Lavinia’s own voice and stories glow with an existential nostalgia that you have no right feeling for pre-Roman Latium. Lavinia’s story, previously unsung, is human and mystical in turns, mixing heartache and family matters with ancient ritual and poetic necromancy. Le Guin weaves history into the story with skill; although the Roman abstraction of divinity is probably too early for Lavinia’s timeline, she still pulls us directly and beautifully into her ancient world. If you liked Circe, you’ll love this.

Le Guin gives a voice to the woman who becomes Aeneas's wife and helps to found Rome.

As I should have come to expect with a writer like Le Guin, this book was not what I was expecting. I was expecting a work of straightforward historical fiction with perhaps a little fantasy, the end of the The Aeneid told from a female point of view, something of a sequel to Jo Graham's Black Ships, which I read previously this year. And I got all that, but Le Guin has added an extra metafictional layer, which makes her book so much more complex and interesting.

Lavinia in this novel is not only a historical figure, but is also a fictional character, a character who knows she's a character and who even meets her author, Vergil, also a character in the show more book. From Vergil, she understands that she was such a minor character that she was barely more than a name, but since she did not die in The Aeneid, she is in effect immortal, and she determines to tell the story that Vergil did not. From Vergil, she also learns the fate of Aeneas--although it's deliberately unclear whether that fate was indeed historical or only fateful because the author had written it so--and armed with that foreknowledge, she is actually able to take control of her own life and shape her destiny.

Lavinia in Le Guin's hands is a fascinating character, a woman who is acutely aware of the position of women--especially the unmarried daughters of kings--in her society. What I admire about her is how she manipulates her own understanding of the world and knowledge of the future to get what she wants. She is not only predestined to marry Aeneas, but she wants to marry him, and when war breaks out over the question, she skillfully uses the people's fear of the gods and oracle to bring her own destiny about. Later, after Aeneas's death, she uses the same strategy to ensure that their son remains with her and she can raise him to adulthood, in direct contradiction of the prevailing traditions. Lavinia does not struggle against the society she is born into; she is a pragmatist who works within the confines of her society in order to transcend them. Yet, the reader must remain aware that she is not a real woman at all, but a character in a poem, an immortal character who transforms herself into author to write her own story, since her author failed to do so.

This was a wonderful character study as well as a multilayered reinterpretation of The Aeneid. Le Guin is always surprising and always worth reading. show less

"All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns as the shuttle returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it."

Lavinia, the daughter of King Latinus and Queen Amata, enjoyed a typical girlhood as the daughter of a nobleman in the time before the founding of Rome. A life of peace and freedom that is, until the day she saw a line of great, black ships coming up the Tiber from the sea. Her mother has determined that she marry her kinsman Turnus, but the omen Lavinia received at the sacred springs tells that she is destined to marry a foreigner and start a bitter war. These ships presage show more the epic war for a kingdom and the founding of a great new empire, with Lavinia herself as the prize.

The arrival of the ships marks the meeting of Lavinia’s story with Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid. While Virgil’s poem tells Aeneas’ story, Lavinia herself is mentioned only once – on the day before his landing in Latinum when her hair is veiled by a ghost fire, an omen for the coming war. In Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin gives voice to an invisible heroine, brings to life an ancient world and creates a powerful companion to one of western literature’s greatest works.

Lavinia is a book of love and war, ritual and duty. Le Guin has crafted a fascinating story of Lavinia’s life in the Regia (the women’s quarters in a great house), filled with her duties as the only daughter of a noble house: keeping the storerooms; joining in the rituals of worship in the atrium; and keeping the peace between a mother driven mad with grief and a father quick to punishment. Well-researched with epic battles and many interwoven threads, Le Guin has captured the spirit of Virgil’s work and presented it faithfully in her own measured, lyric prose. Le Guin’s Lavinia is a strong, fascinating woman, with a tale to rival any hero of old. show less

Lavinia is a story about grief, fate, the succession of generations, and the voices that linger. The "real" Lavinia is an object of Virgil's Aeneid, the daughter of the king Latinus who's betrothal to Aeneas rather the neighboring Turnus is the spark that ignites the bloody war of the second half of the Aeneid. In Virgil's account, Lavinia gets one stanza of description and zero lines of dialog. Le Guin expands this character to a worthy protagonist in her own right.

The story follows Lavinia from her beginning to end--not death, for her existence is too contingent to grant her life, and so without life she is without death. Very roughly, the first third is her childhood, a growing up a wild and free princess in the peaceful realm of her show more father Latinus. The only real discord in the kingdom is between Latinus and Lavinia's mother Amata, who has become maddened and embittered by grief after Lavinia's two brothers died of a childhood fever. As a maiden, Lavinia learns the rites and rituals of her station. She does not want to marry, ever.

But the fate of a princess is betrothal, and Turnus, handsome, strong, wealthy, reckless, greedy, is her most likely suitor and one she attempts to avoid. At a sacred spring, Lavinia encounters the shade of a dying poet centuries hence, and learns that she is part of a poem, and her husband is coming soon. In one rather riveting sequence, the poet describes the way to come in the matter of fact tone of death in the epics: who is speared, who has their throat cut, who has their skull shattered by a rock, who eats dirt with a bloody mouth.

And then Aeneas arrives, and all proceeds as foreseen. Turnus leads the local tribes in a hasty alliance against the Trojans that the old King Latinus is unable to stop. Mars, leaping Mars, Mars Mavors macte esto, takes all the men, and the slaughter becomes its own justification. Lavinia tends the wounded, and learns what the "glory" of war means.

And in the last third, Lavinia finds that peace is a process more than a state. She has three happy years and a son with Aeneas, and then her Trojan dies to a random spear thrown by a bandit at a ford. The fortunes of the kingdom wax and wane under Aeneas's older son Ascanius, and there is finally closure, and a sense that one days these little villages of Latium will become a great empire.

In many ways, Iron Age Italy is just as fantastic as Earthsea or Gethen, and Le Guin has a talent for the rock solidity of the lived experience of Lavinia and her peers, close to the earth and the trees and their cattle. The great powers of the land, the named gods like Vesta, Ceres, Venus, and Mars, and the domestic gods of the Lares and Penates, have an absolute reality in their assurance. Their oracles are unavoidable, fates perfectly bound and cut, even as mortals struggle and grieve. The family relationships that Lavinia has, and the way that rulership is the family writ large, makes the politics and emotions of this distant world come alive.

In the postscript, Le Guin decries that with the loss of the classical education focus on Latin and Greek, the Aeneid is no longer read as it should be. My own education definitely covered the Odyssey (I have Fagles' translation from 9th grade) and the Illiad, but I'm only vaguely familiar with Virgil's work. The question now is which translation. Nicolas Whyte makes a solid case for the classis Dryden over Fagles or Heaney, but apparently Fitzgerald's translation is considered the modern standard. Choices, choices! show less

In this book Ursula K. Le Guin riffs on a minor character from Virgil’s Aeneid, that of Lavinia, daughter of Latinus and eventual wife of Aeneas. Aeneas, of course, was the Trojan prince not killed when Troy fell, escaping and traveling to Italy, after a journey ala Odysseus took him to places like Carthage where he’d meet Queen Dido. His descendants, so the Virgil legend goes, would found Rome. It’s the second half of the Aeneid that Le Guin essentially retells in prose through Lavinia, the point at which Aeneas arrives.

Little was mentioned of Lavinia in the source text, but Le Guin crafts quite a narrative around her, and to her credit, it’s completely harmonious with Virgil’s work. In weaker hands it might have become some show more kind of manifesto, but Le Guin uses Lavinia to fill out the story from a woman’s perspective. The result is a broader picture of life in the 8th century BC in the area around what would become Rome, even if Le Guin (as Virgil did) makes it a teeny less primitive than it may have been, as she discusses in the Afterword. The elements of intrigue and inevitable warfare are of course present, but the perspective shift brings them more to life, and adds a layer of humanism.

Le Guin uses an interesting technique of having the narrator, Lavinia, communicating with poet Virgil who would live centuries later, and aware of this fact, much as the people of the day would consult oracles and abide by them. It’s a scholarly work, and one that was clearly well-researched. It would make a fantastic companion read with the Aeneid, and even reading it many years after the Aeneid in my case, brought it back to life for me. It’s the stuff of legend, but communicates universal truths about humanity, both in virtues and failings. show less

"Lavinia" is a thoughtful exploration of Vergil's shadowy wisp of a character, the daughter of the king of Latium, as introduced in "The Aeneid" as the fought-for bride of Aeneas. In the poem she has no lines and is not given much character beyond "tearing her golden tresses" at her mother's funeral.
Well no more. Le Guin, with deep love and respect for Vergil, decided to delve into the character and her world, suggesting what her life must have been like before the remnants of Trojan society came straggling up their river. First of all, says Lavinia, her hair is dark and always has been. Including even small details such as these, Lavinia tells us the story of her life, gently refuting the poet's portrayal of her while admitting she show more understands why she may have been perceived as nothing more than a meek, obedient daughter.
The writing here is like nothing I've ever read from Le Guin. It is much less dry than her usual style, and more immediately accessible. I've grown accustomed to switching on a certain mode in my brain for processing the dryness when sitting down to read Le Guin, but I found that wasn't necessary at all in this case. There is also a beautiful quality of airiness and earthiness to the atmosphere of the narrative; the whole imagined environment practically hums with life, and Lavinia is a deeply sympathetic and charismatic narrator.
The book is an exquisite portrait of Italy before Rome and before the Greek and Latin gods merged. It is also a meditation on gender roles in peace and especially in war, and observes the effects of warfare on the social fabric of a previously peaceful society. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. show less

""She's pious.' By that word I meant responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe.'

Anything I might say about this novel short of an essay might be a understatement. Le Guin is always insightful, always challenging, always analytical, but in "Lavinia" the eponymous protagonist embodies all these aspects of her author in a manner that repeatedly struck me speechless. This book, in stride with Virgil's "Aeneid," offers not only a suspenseful and vivid story but a compassionate meditation on womanhood, companionship, steadfastness, and what piety could really mean. Entering into one of Le Guin's novels always feels like jumping in at the deep end of the pool, but if you tread water long enough to see what beauty exists about you, such an show more effort is well worth it. show less