| Can I Come Look At These Items? | | This online store is in association with Amazon.com, so these great, high-qualiy products will come from their warehouse or from other partners. Thanks for shopping! |
|
|
|
Lavinia | 
 enlarge | Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $12.25
You Save: $11.75 (49%)
New (44) Used (15) Collectible (1) from $11.29
Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 17871
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
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In a richly imagined, beautiful new novel, an acclaimed writer gives an epic heroine her voice In The Aeneid, Vergil’s hero fights to claim the king’s daughter, Lavinia, with whom he is destined to found an empire. Lavinia herself never speaks a word. Now, Ursula K. Le Guin gives Lavinia a voice in a novel that takes us to the half-wild world of ancient Italy, when Rome was a muddy village near seven hills. Lavinia grows up knowing nothing but peace and freedom, until suitors come. Her mother wants her to marry handsome, ambitious Turnus. But omens and prophecies spoken by the sacred springs say she must marry a foreigner—that she will be the cause of a bitter war—and that her husband will not live long. When a fleet of Trojan ships sails up the Tiber, Lavinia decides to take her destiny into her own hands. And so she tells us what Vergil did not: the story of her life, and of the love of her life. Lavinia is a book of passion and war, generous and austerely beautiful, from a writer working at the height of her powers.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 A Great Modern Writer Filling In The Blanks Of A Classic September 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This novel is a must-read and an amazing and unexpected turn from one of the best-loved writers of sci-fi/fantasy around today. Ursula LeGuin re-tells certain episodes in Virgil's Aeneid from the perspective of Lavinia, the Latin princess whom Aeneas ultimately marries to found the lineage that would later found and lead Rome. In Virgil's play, Lavinia never speaks and is only briefly described. LeGuin gives her voice and creates a remarkable and memorable character.
LeGuin does much more than just re-tell a classic in a modern voice, such as John Steinbeck did with the Arthurian myths. Nor is she just recasting myths from a feminist perspective, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does so well. To the contrary, LeGuin seems to strive -- given the limits of writing in English in the 21st Century -- to have Lavinia speak and act as an ancient proto-Roman woman, adhering as faithfully as she can to the source material. LeGuin seems to flesh out Lavinia as Virgil would have -- if only he'd thought more about her and given her as much ink as he did, for example, with Dido. After narrating the closing episodes of The Aeneid from Lavinia's perspective, LeGuin audaciously finishes the story. One of the most unsatisfying aspects of The Aeneid is that it feels unfinished -- the conventional history is that Virgil had not finished it and left instructions for it to be burned at his death. LeGuin finishes the story lovingly, unflinchingly, and, in the end, satisfyingly.
Without spoiling the plot, LeGuin also interjects a metaphysical twist to Lavinia's existence that is as thought-provoking as her excellent novel Lathe of Heaven. Even though anyone familiar with The Aeneid knows how many of the key events must play out, this novel is full of twists even while adhering faithfully to Virgil's story.
If you know The Aeneid, if you like LeGuin's prior work, or if you like to read, this novel is worth reading. Like most great novels, my only disappointment was that it had to end.
I loved it. September 23, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I loved this book. I am a big fan of Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, and I found Lavinia to be as pleasing to read with lots of farmland imagery, simple life-lesson one liners, and of course intense womanly world knowledge.
It is the kind of book you do not want to put down for fear of returning to the modern world. Excellent, heart wrenching, beautiful, sensual.
 Contingent August 30, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Lavinia, the title character of Ursula LeGuin's unusual novel, is a character from Virgil's AENEID. She plays an important function in that epic about the forefather of the Roman people, because she will become Aeneas' wife and the mother of his son Aeneas Silvius. First mentioned in Book VII, just beyond the half-way point, she becomes the cause of the wars between the Trojans and the Latin tribes that occupy the last six books of the saga. But although she is desired and fought over, she remains a peripheral character whom Virgil never allows to speak. LeGuin now remedies that omission.
"I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. [...] I won't die. Of that I am all but certain. My life is too contingent to lead to anything so absolute as death." In these passages near the beginning of the book, Lavinia recognizes herself as primarily a character of fiction -- Virgil's fiction, and now her own. That is what she means by "contingent," a word that recurs often. In one of her most brilliant strokes, LeGuin, with the imaginative freedom of a science-fiction writer, has Lavinia travel backwards and forwards in time, knowing not only her own history but also parts of her future, and communicating directly with the poet who gave her birth. The two early scenes in which the spirit of the dying Virgil appears to the teenage girl at night in a sacred grove are among the most effective in the book.
But "contingent" has other meanings. In Virgil's epic, as in those of Homer, the actions of men are partly controlled by the intervention of the gods; the whole AENEID can be seen as the outcome of a struggle between Venus and Juno. In writing of the early Italian tribes, LeGuin goes to a simpler form of religion, whose deities are treated as relatives and mentors, appearing in birds and trees, hills and streams. This rural pantheism gives LAVINIA a simple and welcoming setting, in which even the cities seem little more than the clustered houses of the farmers who work the surrounding lands. The absence of distant controlling gods does not make the characters any less contingent on the omens and auguries they draw from the natural world around them; obedience to such influences is a mark of piety and honor, and there are several times where they redirect the whole course of the action. Lavinia has an especially close affinity with the land and its creatures, so the omens that speak to her seem less like outside forces than a reflection of her own sense of what is right.
"Contingent," alas, can often be applied to women's dependent relationship with men. Lavinia, for Virgil, is little more than a trophy, for whom -- no, for which -- Aeneas fights and ultimately kills the Rutulian prince Turnus. But LeGuin paints a society in which women are, literally, given a seat at the table. Her Lavinia has her father's ear and a place in his affections. She has personality and feelings, fire and a will of her own, and she gets to exercise it. Later in the passage quoted above, Lavinia compares herself to a princess who features at the start of Virgil's epic: "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." In writing LAVINIA, LeGuin gives her heroine a feminist liberation. When she is free and follows her heart, in her struggles with her mother, and even when she has to fight against residual male domination, Lavinia is a character to weep over and cheer for. But when, about halfway through the book, the action descends into descriptions of male wars, with long roll-calls of soldiers and warring factions, the title character is momentarily eclipsed. She re-emerges in the second half, which follows her story after the AENEID ends and shows her as a mother rather than a bride. There is a lot here that is interesting, including Lavinia's troubled relationship with her step-son Ascanius, but I feel that without a parallel Virgil text to illuminate, without his compelling time-line, LeGuin's narrative loses cogency and focus. A pity.
Beautiful prose! August 27, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Le Guin proves her literary prowess once again in this brilliant rethinking of Virgil's classic The Aeneid. With a beautiful simplicity of prose, Le Guin recreates the world of Lavinia, destined mother of the Roman Empire, and gives voice to a character who lacked a single line of speech. This book is gorgeous, and I could not read it fast enough.
"And war and glory followed her" August 12, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
For Lavinia, the heroine of this novel, for a long time, love, or the possibility of it seems lost until she meets Aeneas, 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.
|
|
|
| |
News 
