Lavinia
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Reviews
Library Journal Starred Review
Library Journal’s starred review calls Lavinia “Le Guin’s brilliant reimagining of the last six books of
Virgil’s epic poem.” The reviewer says “...this beautiful and moving novel is a love offering to one of the
world’s great poets...”
“Highly recommended.”
— Library Journal
1 March 2008
Kirkus Starred Review
“Le Guin has
researched this ancient world assiduously, and her measured, understated
prose captures with equal skill the permutations of established ritual
and ceremony and the sensations of the battlefield.... Arguably her best novel, and an altogether worthy companion volume to
one of the Western world’s greatest stories.”
— Kirkus Reviews
15 February 2008
Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“Le Guin is famous for creating alternative worlds (as in Left Hand of Darkness), and she approaches Lavinia’s world, from which Western civilization took its course, as unique and strange as any fantasy. It’s a novel that deserves to be ranked with Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.”
[Starred Review]
— Publishers Weekly
24 December 2007
Locus
“Lavinia is a magnificent book, an intellectual, moral and emotional achievement...” [complete review]
— Cecelia Holland
Locus
The Inkwell Review
“Sing Muse, of the woman unsung: Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia is for both scholars and laymen.” The Inkwell Review interviews UKL and reviews Lavinia.
New York Observer
“Ursula Le Guin, who’s been tirelessly writing about war and conflict for the last 40 years in a way that no one has before or since, just published the big and lovely Lavinia, in which she picks up the history of the Latins where Virgil couldn’t be bothered to tread.” [complete review]
— Choire Sicha
The New York Observer
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Le Guin resists the urge to pass judgment, letting the story tell itself. Her narrator’s empathy and tolerance not only make her a compelling character. They also illuminate what is best in The Aeneid, offering us a fresh perspective on our leading epic of how the West was won.” [complete review]
— Mike Fischer
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Daily Camers
“...a highly readable, wise, contemporary novel....”
— Clay Evans
Boulder, CO, Daily Camera
Philadelphia Inquirer
“Lavinia has no feminist ax to grind, but immortality has given her a lot of time to think and she wants to set the record straight.” [complete review]
— Susan Balée
Philadelphia Inquirer
Baltimore Sun
“...devotees and new readers alike have an immensely important work — perhaps the masterwork of her career — to revel in.” [complete review]
— Victoria A. Brownworth
Baltimore Sun.
The Daily Olympian
“Le Guin recasts this story with primal vigor and spare but powerful language.” [complete review]
— Barbara McMichael
The Olympian Online.
All Things Considered
“Ursula Le Guin's delightful new novel...” [complete review — Text or audio]
— Alan Cheuse
All Things Considered
5 May 2008
Salon.com
“...ripe with that half-remembered virtue, wisdom...” [complete review]
— Laura Miller
Salon.com
1 May 2008
The Washington Post
“In simple, stately prose that does no violence to Vergil’s work, Le Guin presents the rough, unpretentious dignity of the ancient pagans.” [complete review]
— Eve Ottenberg
The Washington Post
Chicago Tribune
“...the inspired novelist has turned back toward the past — or, to be precise, poetry and myth about the past, because Lavinia is a literary rather than a historical figure — and written one of the finest novels she has ever made....’” [complete review]
— Alan Cheuse
Chicago Tribune.
26 April 2008
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“...an absorbing, reverent, magnificent story, one I will be pressing upon my friends all year.” [complete review]
— Karen Long
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Los Angeles Times CalendarLive.com
“Everywhere Le Guin catches the rhythms of the great epic, echoes them, riffs. In a way, this is a jazzy book, playing in odd syncopation with a massive canonical work... I found myself delighted, even stunned, by the freshness of Le Guin’s prose...” [complete review]
— Jay Parini
Los Angeles Times Calendar Online
20 April 2007
Portland Oregonian
“Everyone could use a forest of Albunea, a place where dreams, ghosts, owls, oracles and ancestors offer hints about your fate and advice about difficult decisions. In Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant new novel, a great deal is illuminated in Albunea, not least of which is the true character of Lavinia....” [complete review]
— Tricia Snell
Portland Oregonian
Booklist
“Fantasist and SF writer Le Guin turns her attention and her considerable talent to fleshing out a secondary character mentioned briefly in Virgil’s masterpiece, The Aeneid.... The compulsively readable Le Guin earns kudos for fashioning a winning combination of history and mythology featuring an unlikely heroine imaginatively plucked from literary obscurity.”
— Margaret Flanagan
Booklist
15 March 2008
Kirkus Spring & Summer Preview
“National Book Award-winner Ursula K. Le Guin’s decision to give voice to one of Vergil’s most stoically silent characters in the Aeneid will likely have devotees listening with rapt attention.”
“...what may be the crowning magnum opus of her storied career...”
— Kirkus Spring & Summer Preview [2.3Mb pdf]
January 2008
The Christian Science Monitor
“Ursula Le Guin Champions Vergil’s Neglected Heroine.” [ complete review]
Yvonne Zipp
The Christian Science Monitor
Entertainment Weekly
“...elegant and eloquent....”
Interviews & appearances
The Inkwell Review
“Sing Muse, of the woman unsung: Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia is for both scholars and laymen.” The Inkwell Review interviews UKL and reviews Lavinia.
The Book Show
The Book Show, ABC Australia, interviews UKL. Transcript and audio. [Offsite link]
Ursula K. Le Guin on “All Things Considered”
NPR’s Jacki Lyden interviews UKL on “All Things Considered,” 26 April 2008. (Audio)
Video: Ursula K. Le Guin at Powell’s Bookstore
UKL at Powell’s Bookstore. Reading, Q&A about Lavinia. Video courtesy of pdxjustice Media Productions. 22 April 2008. (Video)
Cynthia Crossen interviews UKL for the Wall Street Journal
“Ursula K. Le Guin began her research for her new book, Lavinia, by reading Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid in the original Latin. ‘Very, very slowly,’ she said in an interview. ‘Ten lines a day.’” [continued offsite]
Ursula K. Le Guin told the Kirkus interviewer:
“In the Aeneid, Lavinia is a mere convention, the blond maiden, a background figure barely sketched. Yet this is the woman the hero is commanded by the gods to marry. She so evidently has a voice, and Vergil knew how to listen to women; but he didn’t have time to listen to her. He’s in the war part of his story and has to get all the battles fought. So all Lavinia gets to do is blush. I felt it was time she got to tell her view of things. Inevitably this is also an interpretation of the hero’s story, in which I think Vergil shows the price of public triumph as personal tragedy.
“The first time I really read the Aeneid was in my seventies, when I got enough Latin into my head at last to read it in Latin. Vergil is truly untranslatable; his poetry is the music of his language, and it gets lost in any other. Reading it at last, hearing that incredible voice, was a tremendous joy. And Lavinia’s voice and her story came to me out of that joy. A gift from a great giver.”
About the Book
Troy has fallen. Rome is a tiny village by the seven hills... At the end of Vergil’s epic poem The Aeneid, the Trojan hero Aeneas, following his destiny, is about to marry the Italian girl Lavinia. But in the poem, she has played only the slightest part, and has never spoken a word.
Daughter of a local king, Lavinia has lived in peace and freedom, till suitors came seeking her hand, and a foreign fleet sailed up the Tiber. Now her mother wants her to marry handsome, ambitious Turnus, but strange omens, prophecies spoken by the voices of the sacred trees and springs, foretell that she must marry a stranger. And that she will be the cause of a bitter war. And that her husband will not live long.
Lavinia is determined to follow her own destiny. And when she talks with the spirit of the poet in the sacred grove, she begins to see that destiny. So she gains her own voice, learning how to tell the story Vergil left untold — her story, her life, and the love of her life.
Excerpts
“I know that there will be far greater kings of far greater kingdoms than Latinus of Latium, my father.” [continued]
“I went to the salt beds by the mouth of the river, in the May of my nineteenth year, to get salt for the sacred meal. Tita and Maruna came with me, and my father sent an old house-slave and a boy with a donkey to carry the salt home. It’s only a few miles up the coast, but we made an overnight picnic of it, loading the poor little donkey with food, taking all day to get there, setting up camp on a grassy dune above the beaches of the river and the sea. The five of us had supper round the fire, and told stories and sang songs while the sun set in the sea and the May dusk turned blue and bluer. Then we slept under the seawind.” [continued offsite]
Map of Latium, by Jeffery C. Mathison
Book Tour: Readings & Signings for Lavinia
“Ursula K. Le Guin, True Original” — Rick Simonson reports on UKL’s Lavinia reading at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, for the Publishers Weekly blog.
Lavinia is available at Powell’s Bookstore
Harcourt
April 2008
ISBN13: 9780151014248
ISBN10: 0151014248
