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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.

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?

LeGuin had a great idea -- take the little written about Lavinia, the last wife of the Trojan hero Aeneas, in Vergil's epic poem The Aeneid and flesh it out into a story of pre-Rome Italy. With LeGuin's writing and Vergil as source material what wouldn't be great? Unfortunately, LeGuin seems constrained by the mythological elements in the story and the writing is ponderous and slow, in keeping with epic poetry perhaps, but not what you expect from LeGuin. As others have noted, the writing is beautiful but the story is slow. Even after removing the action of the gods from Vergil, everything is a bit too perfect. LeGuin takes the liberty of having Lavinia know that she has been created by Vergil, but it still would have been nice to be able to see Lavinia as a flesh and blood human being of pre-Roman Latium. The principal characters just don't come alive. Only the slaves and farmers, secondary characters here, seem real. Everyone else is the perfect hero or flawed anti-hero of myth, try as LeGuin does to make them seem real.

On the plus side LeGuin is great writer so you never feel like this is a complete waste of time, and you get to know the story of the Aeneid somewhat, of how after the fall of Troy Aeneas wandered through Africa and Sicily looking for a home for his people, and ended up in Italy, married to a princess of Latium. I didn't learn quite as much about the time and place as I'd have liked, but even though I was a bit disappointed, I'm still glad I read this.

Lavinia, the title character of Ursula LeGuin's unusual novel, is a character from Virgil's AENEID. She plays an important function in that epic about the forefather of the Roman people, because she will become Aeneas' wife and the mother of his son Aeneas Silvius. First mentioned in Book VII, just beyond the half-way point, she becomes the cause of the wars between the Trojans and the Latin tribes that occupy the last six books of the saga. But although she is desired and fought over, she remains a peripheral character whom Virgil never allows to speak. LeGuin now remedies that omission.

"I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. [...] I won't die. Of that I am all but certain. My life is too contingent to lead to anything so absolute as death." In these passages near the beginning of the book, Lavinia recognizes herself as primarily a character of fiction -- Virgil's fiction, and now her own. That is what she means by "contingent," a word that recurs often. In one of her most brilliant strokes, LeGuin, with the imaginative freedom of a science-fiction writer, has Lavinia travel backwards and forwards in time, knowing not only her own history but also parts of her future, and communicating directly with the poet who gave her birth. The two early scenes in which the spirit of the dying Virgil appears to the teenage girl at night in a sacred grove are among the most effective in the book.

But "contingent" has other meanings. In Virgil's epic, as in those of Homer, the actions of men are partly controlled by the intervention of the gods; the whole AENEID can be seen as the outcome of a struggle between Venus and Juno. In writing of the early Italian tribes, LeGuin goes to a simpler form of religion, whose deities are treated as relatives and mentors, appearing in birds and trees, hills and streams. This rural pantheism gives LAVINIA a simple and welcoming setting, in which even the cities seem little more than the clustered houses of the farmers who work the surrounding lands. The absence of distant controlling gods does not make the characters any less contingent on the omens and auguries they draw from the natural world around them; obedience to such influences is a mark of piety and honor, and there are several times where they redirect the whole course of the action. Lavinia has an especially close affinity with the land and its creatures, so the omens that speak to her seem less like outside forces than a reflection of her own sense of what is right.

"Contingent," alas, can often be applied to women's dependent relationship with men. Lavinia, for Virgil, is little more than a trophy, for whom -- no, for which -- Aeneas fights and ultimately kills the Rutulian prince Turnus. But LeGuin paints a society in which women are, literally, given a seat at the table. Her Lavinia has her father's ear and a place in his affections. She has personality and feelings, fire and a will of her own, and she gets to exercise it. Later in the passage quoted above, Lavinia compares herself to a princess who features at the start of Virgil's epic: "Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate." In writing LAVINIA, LeGuin gives her heroine a feminist liberation. When she is free and follows her heart, in her struggles with her mother, and even when she has to fight against residual male domination, Lavinia is a character to weep over and cheer for. But when, about halfway through the book, the action descends into descriptions of male wars, with long roll-calls of soldiers and warring factions, the title character is momentarily eclipsed. She re-emerges in the second half, which follows her story after the AENEID ends and shows her as a mother rather than a bride. There is a lot here that is interesting, including Lavinia's troubled relationship with her step-son Ascanius, but I feel that without a parallel Virgil text to illuminate, without his compelling time-line, LeGuin's narrative loses cogency and focus. A pity.

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.

I didn't take Latin in school and nobody ever made me read THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSEY or THE AENID, even in translation. So although I am an enormous admirer of Ursula K. Le Guin's extraordinary fantasy novels --- her imagined cultures often subvert our assumptions about politics, gender and reality itself (I particularly recommend THE DISPOSSESSED, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and The Earthsea Cycle, whose wizardry way outstrips Harry Potter's) --- I know zilch about Classical history and literature.

Admittedly, a few larger-than-life figures (Hercules, Odysseus, Aeneas) are iconic --- their statues are all over the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Greek and Roman galleries. But those are the heroes. What about heroines? The only ones who come to mind are troublemakers like Helen of Troy, prophetesses like Cassandra, or noble suicides like Dido of Carthage.

Which brings us to Lavinia, who is none of the above. To make a long story ridiculously short, after the Greek victory in the Trojan War the legendary warrior Aeneas escapes to Latium, a then-obscure region of pre-Roman Italy. Lavinia, the local princess, is to be married off to a puffed-up, self-important suitor, but prophecy insists that she will wed a foreigner --- and Aeneas is the obvious candidate. Fighting ensues. There is only the briefest mention of Lavinia in Virgil's original (unfinished) poem; it is Le Guin's notion to re-create and complete this chapter of THE AENEID with her as the protagonist, not a mere pawn in men's games of war and power.

In this I think Le Guin is motivated in part by feminist impulses; as she writes in an Afterword, women in Latium (and later, Rome) were freer and more respected than in Greek society, where they were little better than slaves. She also wants to go against the grain of the conventional epic's emphasis on battle and male heroics, expressing a woman's jaundiced view of war (sadly, all too relevant today). Under her father's benign rule, Lavinia knew only tranquility and is shocked by the bellicose rage that seizes her country with the coming of the Trojans: "I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste."

Le Guin diverges from her source in spiritual matters as well. Instead of the Olympian interventions so characteristic of Classical literature (Aeneas is supposed to be the son of Aphrodite, who often steps in on his behalf), Lavinia's world is stamped by a sort of pantheism; nature itself is sacred. As she puts it: "We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens." Some of the gods she tends and/or pays tribute to (vegetarian and animal-lover alert: there are a lot of sacrifices) are humble household deities or somewhat nebulous oracles; others are grand divinities like Mars. In either case, the mystery and ritual permeating Latinian culture seem very close to the magic of Le Guin's Earthsea books. Maybe LAVINIA is not such a departure for her after all. She is reconstructing a whole culture, if not actually inventing one.

Yet this isn't a traditional historical novel --- it's too twisty and many-layered for that. Often Lavinia speaks both as literary creation and real woman (how postmodern!), and Le Guin tinkers slyly with time, particularly in the first few chapters, when Virgil appears as a shade at the sacred spring. He shows Lavinia Aeneas's past (a neat way of summarizing the action in earlier portions of THE AENEID), her own destiny as wife and widow, and how hers and Aeneas's descendants would build the great city of Rome, in whose "golden" imperial age the poet lived and wrote. This temporal elasticity, though occasionally confusing, seems consistent with the weight given to omens and portents in Lavinia's society. For her people, the future is embedded in the present, and a profound sense of fate informs daily life.

I don't want to make LAVINIA sound like a heavyweight fable. Although Le Guin's language is sometimes more stately and self-consciously "poetic" than in her fantasy novels, she tells a wonderful story with engaging characters. Lavinia is a strong and persuasive protagonist who seizes her destiny rather than simply bowing to it. By refusing to marry Turnus, the local suitor, she is not only obeying a prophecy but also speaking from her own heart. She does not trust her mother, half-crazed by the early loss of Lavinia's twin brothers, and she is bound to her father by affection and respect as well as duty. Further, Lavinia and Aeneas's passionate love is poignantly evoked (for Lavinia has been told by her ghostly poet that they will have but three years together, and she counts off the seasons with a sense of dread), and Aeneas's character is a serious portrait of a true hero: modest, thoughtful, not bloodthirsty. "If you are to rule Latium after me," he tells his son Ascanius, "...I want to know that you'll learn how to govern, not merely make war...that you'll learn to seek your manhood on a greater field than the battlefield."

I must confess, though, that I prefer Le Guin's fantasies. I think she is liberated by the creation of her own worlds; here, she sometimes seems constrained by her literary model --- she calls the book a "love offering" to Virgil, and her introduction of the poet as a ghostly character actually bogs the story down just when it should be taking off. Still, LAVINIA made me want to read THE AENEID --- finally. There's supposed to be a very good recent translation by Robert Fagles, who also did THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY. Maybe it isn't too late for me to get a proper Classical education after all....

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

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."

This novel is a must-read and an amazing and unexpected turn from one of the best-loved writers of sci-fi/fantasy around today. Ursula LeGuin re-tells certain episodes in Virgil's Aeneid from the perspective of Lavinia, the Latin princess whom Aeneas ultimately marries to found the lineage that would later found and lead Rome. In Virgil's play, Lavinia never speaks and is only briefly described. LeGuin gives her voice and creates a remarkable and memorable character.

LeGuin does much more than just re-tell a classic in a modern voice, such as John Steinbeck did with the Arthurian myths. Nor is she just recasting myths from a feminist perspective, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does so well. To the contrary, LeGuin seems to strive -- given the limits of writing in English in the 21st Century -- to have Lavinia speak and act as an ancient proto-Roman woman, adhering as faithfully as she can to the source material. LeGuin seems to flesh out Lavinia as Virgil would have -- if only he'd thought more about her and given her as much ink as he did, for example, with Dido. After narrating the closing episodes of The Aeneid from Lavinia's perspective, LeGuin audaciously finishes the story. One of the most unsatisfying aspects of The Aeneid is that it feels unfinished -- the conventional history is that Virgil had not finished it and left instructions for it to be burned at his death. LeGuin finishes the story lovingly, unflinchingly, and, in the end, satisfyingly.

Without spoiling the plot, LeGuin also interjects a metaphysical twist to Lavinia's existence that is as thought-provoking as her excellent novel Lathe of Heaven. Even though anyone familiar with The Aeneid knows how many of the key events must play out, this novel is full of twists even while adhering faithfully to Virgil's story.

If you know The Aeneid, if you like LeGuin's prior work, or if you like to read, this novel is worth reading. Like most great novels, my only disappointment was that it had to end.

As so many people do, I remember Ursula K. LeGuin's best for her Earthsea Trilogy, which I discovered in 1974 by sheer accident -- I think I found it browsing at my local library walking home from school -- and the story stuck in my head all these long years until I had children of my own, at which point I bought copies of the entire cycle for them. In the interim, of course, two more books had been added to the cycle, so I took the liberty of reading those, and was impressed again (albeit in a different way) with LeGuin's talent and staying power. Though the stories are aimed at children, they're really only "sort-of" aimed at them -- the subject matter and moral of the tales can be appreciated just as well by grown ups, as the themes of greed and power and the necessity for keeping the Equilibrium ring true for adults just as they do for children, and can be appreciated in a different way with some experience of the world.

So much for my preface. Having recently been re-exposed to LeGuin's work, I was favorably disposed to her when I noticed that she had a new novel out. I bought it without even reading the blurb, and started reading it without knowing anything about it, and started to love it before I realized it was telling the story of the Aeneid from a different perspective. If you read the Aeneid in college, you will no doubt recall the story, but LeGuin's retelling of the tale has a power that the poem doesn't -- perhaps because as prose it's more accessible to (most) modern readers -- and I enjoyed reading it much more than I remember enjoying reading Virgil in translation.

On balance, I think LeGuin has been unfairly pigeon-holed as a writer of children's tales and a niche writer of fantasy. She's much more of a myth-maker, a modern story-spinner in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm, and her work has an ease and grace that perhaps deceives people into thinking it's not really literature. It is -- it undeniably is. This is simply a great book.