|
|
|
|
Holistic Guidance - Lavinia
|
List Price: $24.00
Our Price: $15.46
Your Save: $ 8.54 ( 36% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Harcourt
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780151014248
ISBN: 0151014248
Label: Harcourt
Manufacturer: Harcourt
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2008-04-21
Publisher: Harcourt
Studio: Harcourt
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
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.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: An truly imaginative and well written work.
Comment: I've grabbed this work based on the myriad of favourable reviews Ms LeGuin has attracted and because one word that kept appearing was how gorgeous the prose is. As someone trying to pen his own work set in Ancient times, I am keen to find writers who set the standard in terms of "prose" and I must say in purchasing the book solely for that reason I have underestimated the full range of Ms LeGuins talent. In so few words she can create a world and take you there. More than that, though, she takes her readers into the mind and mindset of her characters and gives you a sense of understanding their world. Lavinia's world is also Virgil's, because Lavinia is the king's daughter from the Aeneid who marries Aeneas; together they founded the lineage of Rome.
In the novel Lavinia tells both her own story as well as that of the poet's. There is a fine interweaving between the story from the sacred grove, where Lavinia met (and continues to meet) the spirit of the dying Virgil, and Lavinia's own. Her future is foreshadowed by the poet's words. She knows she will marry Aeneas and that he will live a scant three years longer. So we follow Lavinia as the threads are woven together: Lavinia's growing up, her home and family, Virgil's bloody battles and deaths, the sweet years of marriage, and then the struggles to see the son Lavinia bore Aeneas become the man his father would have wanted.
If you enjoyed Virgil's Aeneid (not that I shall claim to be one), you will enjoy seeing that one line fleshed out by LeGuin into an absorbing and unique tale that breathes life into Lavinia. If you like classical history, this is a fascinating glimpse of the little warrior states that had the misfortune to 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 you can enjoy again and again.
Although my wife will one day tire of my own personal library taking up so much space in the home, I have decided to compromise, in that books of outstanding quality stay, books of lesser quality but still enjoyable go, and those not worth the paper they were written on or of inflicting on others burn. Lavinia will stay.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Aeneiad Brought to Life
Comment: Many of us are familiar at this point with what is known as fanfiction, a largely internet-based genre in which writers of every level of ability apply their skills to worlds and characters created by others. At worst, they offer amateurs a chance to allow their imaginations to play in fields plowed by more skilled craftsmen. At best, they create a fractal lens to the original work, expanding the reader's understanding of the original book and its themes, turning the perspective offered by the original author inside-out and upside-down.
Of late, this genre has gone mainstream. Gregory Maguire's Wicked recast the Wicked Witch of the West as the protagonist of Frank Baum's Oz books. Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad tells of the hardships suffered by Odysseus' abandoned queen.
In Lavinia, master fantasist Ursula K. Le Guin takes a minor character who appears late the Aeneiad--Aeneas' second (or perhaps third, but certainly last) wife, and tells a rich story around her, properly epic in scope and detail.
The book starts with a breath-taking descent into the point of view of Lavinia, princess of a minor Latin kingdom. She is a seer, and the subject of numerous prophecies--the most powerful and closely guarded imparted to her by the dying poet Virgil, who lived hundreds of years in Lavinia's future.
The narrative continually seems to loop back on itself, as Lavinia's knowledge as the point of view character looking back on the events about which she is telling, the knowledge imparted to her by Virgil, and the urgency of the crises through which she lived seem to cross and overlap.
As the book reaches its halfway point, several things begin to weigh it down: Lavinia's own passivity as a character, which is quite profound, and the author's desire to tell the story fully. The final chapters are rushed, whole decades sailing by in the space of paragraphs.
Nevertheless, this wonderful storyteller's ability to weave a fantastic tale out of the material of everyday life (even the everyday life of the Latium of some 2500 or 3000 years ago), and the compelling philosophical questions that Le Guin raises and Lavinia considers--together they make this a worthwhile and original glimpse into Virgil's world.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Book of 2008
Comment: In breathing life into Lavinia, a character Vergil hardly mentioned in the Aeneid, Le Guin has captured old Rome before it was Rome, old ways of the hearth, old gods of the earth, an old language fallen into dust, and has brought them all together into a powerful and poetic novel.
If you seek the pomp and sound-bite world of today's world, today's Rome, and today's gods you may see this novel variously as flat, dull, and boring. What a pity. It is, I think, Le Guin's best novel and, by far, the best book I've read this year.
Lavinia is not only a love offering to Vergil, as the author says, but an incredible treasure in its own right. Le Guin's understated prose, perfectly in tune with the times and the world she imagines, is a wonderful whisper of out of holy springs of the natural Earth.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Great Modern Writer Filling In The Blanks Of A Classic
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I loved it.
Comment: 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.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
