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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 813.54 EAN: 9780151014248 Edition: 1 ISBN: 0151014248 Label: Harcourt Manufacturer: Harcourt Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 288 Publication Date: April 21, 2008 Publisher: Harcourt Studio: Harcourt Editorial Review: Product Description: In a richly imagined, beautiful new novel, an acclaimed writer gives an epic heroine her voice In The Aeneid, Vergil’s hero fights to claim the king’s daughter, Lavinia, with whom he is destined to found an empire. Lavinia herself never speaks a word. Now, Ursula K. Le Guin gives Lavinia a voice in a novel that takes us to the half-wild world of ancient Italy, when Rome was a muddy village near seven hills. Lavinia grows up knowing nothing but peace and freedom, until suitors come. Her mother wants her to marry handsome, ambitious Turnus. But omens and prophecies spoken by the sacred springs say she must marry a foreigner—that she will be the cause of a bitter war—and that her husband will not live long. When a fleet of Trojan ships sails up the Tiber, Lavinia decides to take her destiny into her own hands. And so she tells us what Vergil did not: the story of her life, and of the love of her life. Lavinia is a book of passion and war, generous and austerely beautiful, from a writer working at the height of her powers. Average Rating:
![]() Rating: - A Great Modern Writer Filling In The Blanks Of A ClassicThis 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 ... Read More Rating: - I loved it.I loved this book. I am a big fan of Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, and I found Lavinia to be as pleasing to read with lots of farmland imagery, simple life-lesson one liners, and of course intense womanly world knowledge. It is the kind of book you do not want to put down for fear of returning to the modern world. Excellent, heart wrenching, beautiful, sensual. Rating: - ContingentLavinia, 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 ... Read More Rating: - Beautiful prose!Le Guin proves her literary prowess once again in this brilliant rethinking of Virgil's classic The Aeneid. With a beautiful simplicity of prose, Le Guin recreates the world of Lavinia, destined mother of the Roman Empire, and gives voice to a character who lacked a single line of speech. This book is gorgeous, and I could not read it fast enough. Rating: - "And war and glory followed her"For Lavinia, the heroine of this novel, for a long time, love, or the possibility of it seems lost until she meets Aeneas, the handsome and virile Trojan hero, a foreigner from the other side of the world who sails up the Tiber into a country that will soon become Italy and whom Lavinia is eventually fated to marry. A fully independent spirit and a king's daughter, Lavinia is also a marriageable virgin, obedient and ready to a man's will. We first meet Lavinia living a charmed and mercurial ... Read More |