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A review by mburnamfink
Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
5.0
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 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!
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 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!