Lavinia

In book XII of The Aeneid, Aeneas endeavors to marry Lavinia, a local Latin princess, to achieve power. Sybils tell Lavinias father that she’s got to marry a foreigner, instead of the pre-planned Turnus, which sets off some of the drama in the end of the The Aeneid. Being an ancient poem about muscular manly men, written in the deeply chauvinistic and misogynistic Roman order, Lavinia does not even have a speaking role in the Aeneid. She’s akin to what they call “a McGuffin.” Ursula K Le Guin aspires to a feminist re-telling of the last 6 or so books of the Aeneid from Lavinia’s perspective, wherein she is an active participant in her fate rather than an object to which events simply happen. There is a nice post-modern kind of twist present here, where Lavinia kind of knows she’s a character in a work of fiction and has an ongoing tête-à-tête with Virgil. But I didn’t like this book – Lavinia is not a very strong character, and it is a recounting of events that I didn’t find particularly interesting the first time I read them. I respect the ambition, although the more interesting feminist themes seem to be textual recapitulations of Medea. No particularly moving passages in this book to my recollection. Okay, maybe it’s mythohistorical fiction, but whatever. It counts.

A fast-paced read, which was a change of pace from my experience of Le Guin's other writing, which tends to be very measured (even, sometimes, ponderous). As usual, a real sense of immersion into a place and time and culture, though less anthropologically-minded than some of her other work (e.g., The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home). You can read this in a weekend if you do nothing else; in a week if you have more going on in your life. And it's well worth the time.

I like this book so much I read it twice. It is a retelling of the Aeneid from the point of view of Lavinia, the king's daughter whom Aeneas marries when he arrives in Italy. However, unlike Marion Zimmer Bradley's disappointing retellings of famous stories, this is a rich book in its own right. It thinks about the relationship of the storyteller to his characters and how famous stories shape the people who know and live with them. It also thinks about the society that Aeneas came to, how it was similar to the Greek society he had left, and how it was different in important ways. I highly recommend.

Coming up with my final rating took some thinking, but in the end I'll go for four stars. I really enjoyed the description of the fairly humble pre-Roman society, with all their daily habits and small, quiet ways of worship, and the clashes of men with their big ideas and ambitions, told from the perspective of a woman originally written fairly deep in the margins of the old epics.

It's all well-written, warm, and peaceful, despite the drama, tragedy and war involved. All in all, a delightful book.