Lavinia

Ursula K. Le Guin
2008

rating: good

plot: A re-imagining of portions of the Aeneid by Aeneis' wife, Lavinia.



I am not a fan of the Roman hero Aeneis.* In my view, he is the second biggest screwer-over of a good woman in the whole of Greek mythology. The biggest being that jerk-wad Jason. But at least Jason's Medea had an impressive revenge. Aeneis' Queen Dido went out like a wimp - basically throwing herself on a funeral pyre when, after a year of seeing to Aeneis' every need, he tells her, "nuts to you, we weren't officially married anyway, see you later sucker," and sails away.

But of course I knew Le Gruin, most famous for her Earthsea series, would write a compelling story. Indeed, she managed to make Aeneis a sympathetic character. But the story wasn't about him; it was about Lavinia, the princess who didn't even have a single line of dialog in the epic poem.

When I picked up the book, I thought it would be like Marion Zimmer Bradley's, The Firebrand, which was a straight retelling of the Trojan war from Cassandra's perspective. Instead Le Gruin had the narrator, Lavinia herself, step back and acknowledge that she was telling a story that was based on the poem. Lavinia has a wider knowledge of her fate and the fate of her descendants that your typical first-person narrator. I think Le Gruin was going for a reflection of the original poem. Consider that the poet Virgil wrote the Aeneis in a time when people didn't believe in the literal personification of Gods anymore. He wrote it as an imagined history of the Roman empire (maybe a little bit like how people these days write about King Arthur and Merlin as the founders of modern Brittan).

I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in epic stories about love and war (although the book is brief compared to your typical epic). The book takes Lavinia from girlhood, through the war over her hand in marriage, through the rest of her life as Queen. No knowledge of the Aeneid is necessary to read this. Although after I finished, I was driven to pick up, for the thousandth time, Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Hamilton's book is a concise summary of all the important myths and poems that I recommend for anyone with even a passing interest in Greek/Roman mythology.

*note: Although Aeneis himself was Trojan, the Aeneid was written by Virgil in the time of Caesar Augustus as a Roman rallying myth.