Lavinia
Ursula K. Le Guin
Orion
May 2009
Harcourt
April 2008
Mariner Books
April 2009
Mythopoeic Award Nomination
Lavinia nominated for Mythopoeic Award (May 2009)
The Best Books of 2008
“A time-traveling Virgil meets the young wife he tosses off in a few lines in The Aeneid, and gasps, ‘I thought you were a blonde.’ Le Guin’s wit and scholarship burnish this beautiful, rewarding and unjustly overlooked novel, for which she retooled her grasp of Latin. A believable immersion into an ancient world and the antique virtues of loyalty and grace.” — Karen Long, Book Editor, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sunday, December 14, 2008. [complete article]
Online Reading
Audiofile of UKL's Lavinia reading at the Corvallis-Benton County Library MP3 [24Mb] 
Reviews
The Telegraph
21 June 2009
(Excerpt)
“Her achievement is to complement the original
epic so distinctively, as if in a dialogue or
dance with the poet who inspired her.” — John Garth [complete review]
The Guardian
14 June 2009
(Excerpt)
“She is a social novelist in the best sense of the term [...] her ultimate concern is with the real world. In this novel, Virgil’s imaginary Italy allows her a manipulatory freedom which a more realistic method would not.” [complete review]
Tobias Hill
The Guardian
Times Literary Supplement
May 22, 2009
(Excerpts)
...Ursula Le Guin’s vivid novel gives Lavinia a voice, without any serious pretence that the experience of a princess of the Bronze Age can be recalled. ... The world she describes in tender detail is a pastoral utopia, sufficiently alien from modern values to catch the interest of an author who has always chosen to examine the workings of contemporary society by imagining something wholly different....
...The most haunting passages of the novel imagine Lavinia meeting the shade of Virgil at the sacred shrine of Albunea, where spirits communicate with the living. These encounters are necessarily perplexing, for Lavinia knows that she has no life outside Virgil’s poem.... Virgil is brought to acknowledge that he has not done justice to the self-possessed, dark young woman who stands before him: “I thought you were a blonde!” Here Le Guin makes her authority felt, insisting on a different kind of reality.... But this is not a matter of Le Guin affirming a superior understanding. Virgil’s dignity and stature are given their full weight, and a sense of his sadness suffuses the novel....
...Lavinia’s enduring vitality lies in her love for her flawed and courageous husband, who represents a society with ‘certain homely but delicate values, such as ... loyalty, modesty, and responsibility.’ Le Guin has her own modesty, and would not claim to have superseded Virgil’s achievement. Her novel ... is a moving testament to the conversations that great writers sustain through the centuries.
— Dinah Birch
Times Literary Supplement
May 22, 2009
The Guardian
“[A] subtly moving, playful, tactfully told story, a novel that brought me to tears more than once.” Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian, 23 May 2009. [complete review]
Death Ray Magazine
“...a perfectly balanced blend of feeling, metre and storytelling...” Review of Lavinia by Guy Haley, Death Ray. [complete review] [240Kb PDF]
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...”
— Jay Parini
Los Angeles Times Calendar Online
20 April 2007
[complete review]
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....”
— Tricia Snell
Portland Oregonian
[complete review]
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
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.”
— Publishers Weekly Starred Review
24 December 2007
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.” Yvonne Zipp reviews Lavinia.
Entertainment Weekly
“...elegant and eloquent....”
Interviews & appearances
22 July 2008: Jim Schumock interviews UKL for KBOO radio. Streaming audio.
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)
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.”
“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]
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]
Website Copyright © 2009 by Ursula K. Le Guin
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Updated Saturday June 27 2009
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