Lavinia

In her afterword, LeGuin is explicit about her intentions as a writer. I think she will forgive me, a grateful reader, for appearing to contradict her in my own response to the novel. Likewise, I think she will indulge me in renaming her book "The Laviniad." "Lavinia" is LeGuin's grateful gift to Virgil, a loving reciprocation for his gift to her (and all of us), the Aeneid. (It is also, unavoidably, an answer of sorts to Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad.) More than "a riff on the Aeneid", as she called it at Powell's, it is a completion of sorts, carrying on where Virgil was (some say) compelled by death to leave off. (The Aeneid stops abruptly at the point where Aeneas kills Turnus.) But, just as the Aeneid is a semi-sequel to the Iliad, but with its own imagination and its own organizing principles, so is the Laviniad a semi-sequel to the Aeneid, moving the story forward, but centered around characters peripheral to, or absent from, its literary predecessor. This is, most of all, Lavinia's story. But it is also, like the Aeneid, Aeneas' story and Rome's story, called forth this time from the imagination of LeGuin, who took the torch from Virgil, who had it from Homer. Aeneas' killing of Turnus, which kills the Aeneid, becomes here the critical moment that shapes Aeneas' eventual death, and haunts his conscience along the way. In the center of this arc, we hear this Socratic conversation, in which Aeneas is simultaneously wrestling with his own angel and trying to pass the torch of piety to his son Ascanius. "But what is piety?" Aeneas asked. That brought a thoughtful silence. "Obedience to the will of the powers of earth and sky?" I said at last, making my statement a question, as women so often do. "The effort to fulfill one's destiny," Achates said. "Doing right," said Illivia, Serestus' wife, a calm, forceful woman from Tusculum, who had become one of my dearest friends. "What is right in battle, in war?" Aeneas asked. "Skill, courage, strength," Ascanius answered promptly. "In war, virtue is piety. Fighting to win!" "So victory makes right?" "Yes," Ascanius said, and several of the men nodded vigorously; but the older Trojans, some of them, did not. Nor did the women. "I cannot make it out," Aeneas said in his quiet voice. "I thought what a man knew he ought to do was what he must do. But what if they're not the same? Then, to win a victory is to be defeated. To uphold order is to cause disorder, ruin, death. Virtue and piety destroy each other. I cannot make it out."

Two things I appreciated about Lavinia beyond the exceptional skill with words and characterization that I have come to expect from Ursula Le Guin: 1. I enjoyed her keen perspective on the Aeneid. I read the epics of Homer and Virgil back in college and so the conversations in this novel between Virgil and Lavinia made me laugh uproariously yet at the same time had a lot of depth. Lavinia has a perspective on the events in these stories that is all her own. 2. This book brought early Roman culture and religion to life for me. Before reading this novel, I hadn't considered looking into early Roman culture, but now I might just check up on some of the histories Le Guin mentions in her acknowledgements. To appreciate this novel more, I would have liked to reread the Aeneid first, but it was worth the read anyway and I think it'd be fun even if I hadn't read Virgil.

Read it. I read about Le Guin's adaption of the second 6 books of the Aeneid in last Saturday's WSJ's Arts Section. She prepared by reading the entire epic in Latin. This book is even more spare, more austere than most of her work, but it is not self-conscious or self-gratulatory about it. She has caught the "Old Roman" voice and understands the almost untranslatable words "pietas" and "nefas." No English words do these concepts of moral and civic virtue as opposed to unspeakable wrong justice, and Le Guin both knows this and presents them as the ongoing moral struggles and examples they represent. She has also placed herself firmly in the grand tradition in which, Vergil, Dante's "il miglior fabbro" (sp) appears to her (and to her protagonist, the Italian princess who marries Aeneas) and explains, as he is floating in and out of life, what he was trying to do with his vision, in tribute to and in conflict with Augustus in a very different city indeed. In the end, character enters into dialogue with poet: creator and created benefit from the experience. Because, as Lavinia says with no resentment, Vergil has failed to "breathe sufficient life" into her (she has not a single word of dialogue in the poem), she has not life enough to die like Dido (who really is an operatic character), but lives on, a quiet, eloquent voice of an intregrity that Rome lost, but never ceased to value. Le Guin's prose is very different from the clangor of the dactylic hexameter epic line. It is brilliant, bravura, meant for battle and great deeds; Lavinia's quiet prose describes daily wonders and is wrought out of her service of her city, her family, and her altars -- a different sort of vocabulary, indeed. Both possess their own strengths. And Le Guin now joins the artists who, in the Middle Ages, wrote within the Matter of Antiquity, which was, as a twelfth-century Frenchman said, wise. He was right.

This is the by far the best book I have read so far in 2008. It has lovely prose, and filled with intelligent writing and levels upon levels of meaning. LeGuin is clearly inspired by the classic The Aeneid: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editio). She tells the story of Aeneas and the Trojans coming to Italy through the point of view of the native Latin people, particularly through the eyes of their kind and intelligent princess, Lavinia, destined to become the second wife of the Trojan prince and leader Aeneas, and the mother of Rome. The events of this story can be interpreted as a tragedy to the Latins - armed strangers come to their country, a war immediately breaks out, the leader of the strangers marries their princess (the only surviving child of their king), and their culture and destiny are changed forever. The Latins living through these happenings certainly do not realize that these events will someday lead to the Roman Empire. Particularly well done (in a marvelously well written book) are the explorations of the relationship between creator and character - as in the scenes when Lavinia goes to the sacred springs of her family and receives visions of the poet Virgil. She is his character; he her creator. They are being granted visions of each other, separated as they are through hundreds of years and layers of myths and legend. Does he change reality to better fit his artistic visions? Who effects whom more - Lavinia or Virgil? Which comes first - character or creator?

At what is undeniably the height of her writing prowess, Ursula K. Le Guin brings us a novel of incredible richness and depth. As example I offer this: It is the only book I have read that contains a self-aware character. Lavinia sees herself as a character, brought into being by Virgil's poem and given immortality by her scant share of it. "I am contingent," she tells us early on, perhaps meaning that her being is dependent upon Virgil who will be born many centuries in her future. What emerges under Le Guin's careful stewardship of this fragile being, brought into existence by a passing remark of a poet, is a rich landscape of simple country life. Along with Lavinia we experience the joys and comfort of simple rituals, offerings to household gods and the spinning of wool. We witness the arrival of a great hero as foretold by ancient oracles. As treaties are made and broken we endure the horror of war and then watch with pondering inevitability as the happiness of marriage swiftly becomes the tragedy of a widow and the squandering of a husband's dream. We are redeemed in the end by Lavinia's immortality and by, again, the inevitability of history. Rome is founded. Virgil writes his epic. Lavinia is given life. With her skill, Le Guin does more than expand upon the immortal life that Virgil granted to Lavinia, she draws us into that life. Lavinia speaks to us across the centuries, but through Le Guin's work, we also wander the wooded hills of ancient Latinum. There is depth to this work that I think I will only discover upon re-reading it. And then there are depths that I think I will only discover after re-reading the Aenied. And there are still more depths that are hinted at, glimmers in the darkness, that I may never guess at unless I were to learn more Latin and read the Aeneid in Virgil's own language. That is why I call this novel "masterpiece." If I do not see its like again I will be satisfied to know that some measure of it will go on, as Lavinia has.