Rating: 
(14 reviews)
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Harcourt
Product Description
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 in the poem. 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 make her own destiny, and she tells us what Vergil did not: the story of her life, and of the love of her life. Lavinia is a book of love and war, generous and austerely beautiful, from a writer working at the height of her powers.
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I didn’t take Latin in school and nobody ever made me read THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSEY or THE AENID, even in translation. So although I am an enormous admirer of Ursula K. Le Guin’s extraordinary fantasy novels — her imagined cultures often subvert our assumptions about politics, gender and reality itself (I particularly recommend THE DISPOSSESSED, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and The Earthsea Cycle, whose wizardry way outstrips Harry Potter’s) — I know zilch about Classical history and literature.
Admittedly, a few larger-than-life figures (Hercules, Odysseus, Aeneas) are iconic — their statues are all over the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greek and Roman galleries. But those are the heroes. What about heroines? The only ones who come to mind are troublemakers like Helen of Troy, prophetesses like Cassandra, or noble suicides like Dido of Carthage.
Which brings us to Lavinia, who is none of the above. To make a long story ridiculously short, after the Greek victory in the Trojan War the legendary warrior Aeneas escapes to Latium, a then-obscure region of pre-Roman Italy. Lavinia, the local princess, is to be married off to a puffed-up, self-important suitor, but prophecy insists that she will wed a foreigner — and Aeneas is the obvious candidate. Fighting ensues. There is only the briefest mention of Lavinia in Virgil’s original (unfinished) poem; it is Le Guin’s notion to re-create and complete this chapter of THE AENEID with her as the protagonist, not a mere pawn in men’s games of war and power.
In this I think Le Guin is motivated in part by feminist impulses; as she writes in an Afterword, women in Latium (and later, Rome) were freer and more respected than in Greek society, where they were little better than slaves. She also wants to go against the grain of the conventional epic’s emphasis on battle and male heroics, expressing a woman’s jaundiced view of war (sadly, all too relevant today). Under her father’s benign rule, Lavinia knew only tranquility and is shocked by the bellicose rage that seizes her country with the coming of the Trojans: “I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste.”
Le Guin diverges from her source in spiritual matters as well. Instead of the Olympian interventions so characteristic of Classical literature (Aeneas is supposed to be the son of Aphrodite, who often steps in on his behalf), Lavinia’s world is stamped by a sort of pantheism; nature itself is sacred. As she puts it: “We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens.” Some of the gods she tends and/or pays tribute to (vegetarian and animal-lover alert: there are a lot of sacrifices) are humble household deities or somewhat nebulous oracles; others are grand divinities like Mars. In either case, the mystery and ritual permeating Latinian culture seem very close to the magic of Le Guin’s Earthsea books. Maybe LAVINIA is not such a departure for her after all. She is reconstructing a whole culture, if not actually inventing one.
Yet this isn’t a traditional historical novel — it’s too twisty and many-layered for that. Often Lavinia speaks both as literary creation and real woman (how postmodern!), and Le Guin tinkers slyly with time, particularly in the first few chapters, when Virgil appears as a shade at the sacred spring. He shows Lavinia Aeneas’s past (a neat way of summarizing the action in earlier portions of THE AENEID), her own destiny as wife and widow, and how hers and Aeneas’s descendants would build the great city of Rome, in whose “golden” imperial age the poet lived and wrote. This temporal elasticity, though occasionally confusing, seems consistent with the weight given to omens and portents in Lavinia’s society. For her people, the future is embedded in the present, and a profound sense of fate informs daily life.
I don’t want to make LAVINIA sound like a heavyweight fable. Although Le Guin’s language is sometimes more stately and self-consciously “poetic” than in her fantasy novels, she tells a wonderful story with engaging characters. Lavinia is a strong and persuasive protagonist who seizes her destiny rather than simply bowing to it. By refusing to marry Turnus, the local suitor, she is not only obeying a prophecy but also speaking from her own heart. She does not trust her mother, half-crazed by the early loss of Lavinia’s twin brothers, and she is bound to her father by affection and respect as well as duty. Further, Lavinia and Aeneas’s passionate love is poignantly evoked (for Lavinia has been told by her ghostly poet that they will have but three years together, and she counts off the seasons with a sense of dread), and Aeneas’s character is a serious portrait of a true hero: modest, thoughtful, not bloodthirsty. “If you are to rule Latium after me,” he tells his son Ascanius, “…I want to know that you’ll learn how to govern, not merely make war…that you’ll learn to seek your manhood on a greater field than the battlefield.”
I must confess, though, that I prefer Le Guin’s fantasies. I think she is liberated by the creation of her own worlds; here, she sometimes seems constrained by her literary model — she calls the book a “love offering” to Virgil, and her introduction of the poet as a ghostly character actually bogs the story down just when it should be taking off. Still, LAVINIA made me want to read THE AENEID — finally. There’s supposed to be a very good recent translation by Robert Fagles, who also did THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY. Maybe it isn’t too late for me to get a proper Classical education after all….
— Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
Last night I intended to read LAVINIA for about 30 minutes, then turn the lights out at about midnight. The next time I looked at the clock it was 2 AM! I’d been transported.
Need I say more? Is there any higher praise?
If you are an Ursula Le Guin fan, this is a wondrous new journey. New to Le Guin? Prepare to be amazed.
Kirtland Peterson
LeGuin does it again. I always enjoyed her Earthsea books and this is a little different but just as good. Lavinia is an interesting woman with a good story to tell. Way to go, Ursula (I can call her that because we’re about the same age).
In her afterword, LeGuin is explicit about her intentions as a writer. I think she will forgive me, a grateful reader, for appearing to contradict her in my own response to the novel. Likewise, I think she will indulge me in renaming her book “The Laviniad.”
“Lavinia” is LeGuin’s grateful gift to Virgil, a loving reciprocation for his gift to her (and all of us), the Aeneid. (It is also, unavoidably, an answer of sorts to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad.) More than “a riff on the Aeneid”, as she called it at Powell’s, it is a completion of sorts, carrying on where Virgil was (some say) compelled by death to leave off. (The Aeneid stops abruptly at the point where Aeneas kills Turnus.) But, just as the Aeneid is a semi-sequel to the Iliad, but with its own imagination and its own organizing principles, so is the Laviniad a semi-sequel to the Aeneid, moving the story forward, but centered around characters peripheral to, or absent from, its literary predecessor. This is, most of all, Lavinia’s story. But it is also, like the Aeneid, Aeneas’ story and Rome’s story, called forth this time from the imagination of LeGuin, who took the torch from Virgil, who had it from Homer.
Aeneas’ killing of Turnus, which kills the Aeneid, becomes here the critical moment that shapes Aeneas’ eventual death, and haunts his conscience along the way. In the center of this arc, we hear this Socratic conversation, in which Aeneas is simultaneously wrestling with his own angel and trying to pass the torch of piety to his son Ascanius.
“But what is piety?” Aeneas asked.
That brought a thoughtful silence.
“Obedience to the will of the powers of earth and sky?” I said at last, making my statement a question, as women so often do.
“The effort to fulfill one’s destiny,” Achates said.
“Doing right,” said Illivia, Serestus’ wife, a calm, forceful woman from Tusculum, who had become one of my dearest friends.
“What is right in battle, in war?” Aeneas asked.
“Skill, courage, strength,” Ascanius answered promptly. “In war, virtue is piety. Fighting to win!”
“So victory makes right?”
“Yes,” Ascanius said, and several of the men nodded vigorously; but the older Trojans, some of them, did not. Nor did the women.
“I cannot make it out,” Aeneas said in his quiet voice. “I thought what a man knew he ought to do was what he must do. But what if they’re not the same? Then, to win a victory is to be defeated. To uphold order is to cause disorder, ruin, death. Virtue and piety destroy each other. I cannot make it out.”
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.