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LAVINIA
by ursula k. le guin
While on one level I want to say that I enjoyed Lavinia a lot, at the same time it is an odd little book that I can't really see having been published if it wasn't someone like Ursula Le Guin who wanted to write and get it published. It's essentially fanfiction, isn't it? The kind of "Let's fill in the holes of the original canon and/or explore this character who got sidelined in the original canon" thing that fanfic writers so often do, and the way Lavinia reads, I could totally see it being the fill for a Yuletide request for the Aeniad.
Because, okay, Lavinia, unsurprisingly, is the story of Lavinia, the Latin princess who Aeneas fights to win the right to marry in the later bits of Virgil's Aeniad. Le Guin very obviously set out to fill in the life of this woman who got all of a line in the original work and to make her more of a self-possessed, self-directed individual and not, in the immortal words of Princess Jasmine, a prize to be won.
It's a book concept that I admire very much and obviously Ursula Le Guin has been doing this a long time and acquits herself pretty damn well. Her picture of Latin culture is extremely interesting. Her ability to sit the story solidly in its historical context without getting too exposition-y and making Lavinia a strong-willed protagonist without triggering the LOL ANACHRONISM part of my brain is a definite accomplishment.
But it's weird nonetheless because the story is still all about Aeneas. That's where the entire first 2/3s of the book is leading, the motivating force that gives meaning to the list of random day-to-day life for Lavinia. And then when Aeneas drops out of the book again, and there's still about a third left to go, the book loses all of its motivation and just kind of flails about in all directions until it reaches an end. In telling Lavinia's story, obviously you can't stop the story because the male motivating factor stops because that would defeat the whole purpose, but it's weird nonetheless when the story's actual forward-moving action is still all wrapped up in the choices of men, and Lavinia still doesn't have much to do but sit around and react and mostly seems to drift without men to push her in particular directions. I'm not necessarily against that because let's not sugar coat the ancient world, but it does make the last third of the book strangely purposeless and unconnected, and I don't get much of a sense that Le Guin realizes any of this?
So, I guess what I'm saying is A+ for effort, Bish for actual result. Ultimately I think if this was a Yuletide story, it might have actually done better because a lower word count would have helped; the book needs more focus, essentially, and stricter editing. There's also some strange meta things going on within the book (Lavinia speaks with Virgil and is aware that she's fictional in part?) and to be honest, while I liked that idea too, I feel like it belonged in a different book entirely. So maybe what I'm really saying is that Le Guin needed to commit more fully to any of the ideas she poked at in this book but all she seemed really interested in doing was just the poking. Still! Not a bad read!
This book is in first person, but it kind of had to be, I guess.
Favourite Part: Definitely some of the early descriptions of life in Lavinia's kingdom, and the weird sense of anticipation/dread that the book builds up regarding Aeneas's coming.
Excerpt: When my son was a boy the forests were safer for him than the pagus fields. But when I was a girl I walked the open hillsides and the wilderness paths to Albunea with no companion but Maruna. Sometimes she accompanied me all the way, sometimes she stayed the night with a woodcutter's family at the edge of the forest while I went alone to the sacred glade. We could do this because the peace my father had brought to Latium was real and durable. In that peace, little children could watch the cattle, shepherds could let their flocks wander in the summer pastures with no risk of theft, women and girls need not go guarded or in bands but could walk without fear on any path of Latium. Even in the true wild where there were no paths we were afraid of wolf and boar, not man. Because this order had held all my life as a girl, I thought it was the way the world had always been and would be. I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste. Of all the greater powers the one I fear most is the one I cannot worship, the one who walks the boundary, the one who sets the ram on the ewe, and the bull on the heifer, and the sword in the farmer's hand: Mavors, Marmor, Mars.