Oh, and Lavinia is implicitly the mother of the Roman race. I think I'm incapable of disliking a Le Guin book. A goddess-driven storm cast them up on the shores of Carthage, but despite a fling with Queen Dido of Carthage, Aeneas refused to settle there. The Aeneid, however, although it takes much from Homer, is a celebration of the Roman state, to whose future domination Dido and Turnus must be sacrificed.

There, I said it. A Rutulian king named Turnus had the hots for her and felt upstaged when Aeneas swooped in, and that–ie, she–is what set off the bloody wars. Damnit!!! In her novel Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin, author of the Earthsea series and many other science fiction and fantasy novels, gives life to a forgotten character from Virgil's Aeneid.Lavinia is the daughter of King Latinus of Latium, and in Virgil's epic she is destined to marry the Trojan hero Aeneas. In fact, had she focused on the 3 years that Lavinia and Aeneas were together, and made that the whole novel, she could have created near-unbearable tension as we build up to Aeneas' death. I guess I should say, I kept waiting for the climax, and it never happened. But what a shame about the corny bits. Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, is a pawn in the epic, the virgin who must marry Aeneas. We are so grateful. We’d love your help. This summer we're turning to the experts of illusion,... To see what your friends thought of this book, [ 20 Furthermore, this discussion of Lavinia as a tool of political power marks a change in tone from the personal first half, to a more politically driven second half. His descendants Romulus and Remus were founders of Rome. But I haven’t said much about the enemies of good stories. She is pursued by many suitors, but the great warrior Turnus, lord of a nearby kingdom, appears most eligible for her hand. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Lavinia takes her time telling her story, and you feel like you're there with her. When I am in the middle of a piece, if I see that I am using too many cliches, I usually do not throw the baby out with the bath water and start from scratch. But Virgil died, so the epic concludes with Aeneas killing Turnus in a fit of rage, despite the young man's plea for mercy. You’ve heard of Dido and Aeneas (and Purcell, Virgil and all that).

We give some of them names - Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse.

If a certain story element–plot, character, scene–is timeless, then it would seem destined to become a cliché eventually. 39–40 and Other Examples (1994) 12 Introductory Poems in Propertius: 1. The tone of the book was quiet and ghostly, very in the past so I never felt anything immediate. Well, a well-known author named Ursula LeGuin decided to pick one of the most obscure but potentially interesting characters of the whole Aeneid and give you Lavinia and Aeneas. Really. (I can tell that the storyteller in you is speaking.) There, I said it.

So does Livy. As he took his ships to sea, Dido stabbed herself to death on a funeral pyre. ( Log Out /  books), opts to fill in the space around Aeneas and his battles. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of. The whole thing has a cursory feel, like the treatment for a novel in places. A sort of alchemy…. I always found it to be a chore, as poetry is more challenging to translate than textbook translating exercises like "Roma est in Italia." Being a lady classicist often requires willful acts of cognitive dissonance. So I picked it up. In the end, it comes down to Aeneas waging single combat with Turnus to end the slaughter. I gave this book four stars for its credible evocation of a very different time and place; for the feeling it gave of research thoroughly done but applied with a light hand; and most of all for the beauty of Le Guin's prose. I was intrigued. 1 and 2. ( Log Out / 

It’s always nice to have something to start out with, rather than the horrible blank page. Recommending the book by a hair is not enough for me. Her book club, having heard that NPR considers the book one of last year’s best, decided to read it. I always found it to be a chore, as poetry is more challenging to translate than textbook translating exercises like "Roma est in Italia." “You would get more out of this,” she kept saying to me, since there was all this, you know, ancient and Roman stuff in it.

Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Then move away from it, step by step, until you arrive at something original”. I thought this book was boring. But what gets good is, in effect, the last part of the old Aeneid. Every Thursday, we'll send you ways to help you live better and stay connected while we’re social distancing. While, Don't go reading Le Guin expecting Koontz. Thanks. I don't read a lot of YA books and can't say for sure if they are similar to this book, but during the reading I was thinking - this is how YA should be: with deep meaning, with characters as model roles to learn from, and if it's historical - help to learn something you won't maybe sit down to read yourself. Is it possible that Ursula K. LeGuin can write a bad book? Being the bleeding heart I am I hope she doesn’t get bent out of shape. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido's. But it’s not easy. Like you could say the Australian aboriginal dreamtime was real, because those people used it to navigate their world, the mythic world of Vesta, Juno, and Mars was real because the Latins' mental model of the world revolved around them. She becomes his second wife (after Creusa in Troy), with whom he will sire the Roman race. . His first wife was killed during the sack of Troy, though Aeneas escaped with his son and father and took a remnant of Trojans to seek a new home. I think cliché is the most dangerous of them. April 1st 2008 Must ponder more…. And this came to mind: So I remember Alfred Hitchcock saying in some interview I once saw.

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