Lavinia is austere, meticulously researched, beautifully written, but for the most part curiously uninvolving.
Perhaps my greatest complaint about it is that although Le Guin sets out to give a voice to a voiceless character from Vergil’s Aenead, the king’s daughter whom Aeneas wins in order to found the Roman empire, I finish the book feeling that I don’t really know Lavinia any better than I did at the start. She never comes alive, except as a quiet, curiously passive woman who moves through the pages observing the tumult swirling around her. We are meant to feel a great love affair between her and Aeneas, but we are not given any real stake in it.
As a critical reader, I can not help but admire Le Guin’s prose. She is a great stylist, and you can feel the careful craft behind every sentence. It’s a long time since I read Vergil in Latin, but I sensed that certain passages were direct translations. All in all, this novel read a little like an academic exercise in scholarship and clear, luminous prose.
There is an emotional pay-off at the end that makes up for quite a bit, but I’m not sure I’d recommend the novel to anyone except those interested in the period or who, like me, are long-time admirers of Le Guin’s work.
Bob Thompson, in an article, “Writing About Writers”, interviews Margaret Atwood (he also talks to Joan Didion):
Once, when Margaret Atwood (at left) came through Washington, I bought her a glass of lemonade and watched her draw waves in the air to illustrate the differences among literary forms. “The wavelengths of a poem are very short,” she said, chopping a hand quickly up and down. “You’re looking at the patterns of syllables, and how consistent they are with other syllables a little further down, and words and rhythms.” The wavelengths of a novel are long, like a tidal wave’s, so “if you put the pistol on page 30, you’re probably going to see it again on page 162 and then it goes off on page 415 — kaboom.” As for the short story, which was what I’d come to ask about, “the wavelengths are in between those two forms, and you can get a very condensed amount of power into that, of a different kind.”
Call it Atwood’s First Law of Literature: “It’s just a question of wavelength, how far away the bits of it are from the other bits.”
I mostly loved this, even though it sagged a bit in the middle. Some people seem to hate it because it’s not The Time Traveller’s Wife. Well, it’s not. But it is a graceful, odd, faintly sad novel, populated by characters who are more subtle and have more complex motives than you might first suspect. It has the same kind of matter-of-fact fantasy; I’m not sure whether you’d call it magic realism, or a ghost story. One of the main characters is a ghost (and that’s not a spoiler – she dies in the first chapter). I loved the world Niffenegger creates: the old house on the edge of a cemetery, full of the lonely and the slightly odd. There’s something of the Moomins in characters like Martin, the obsessive/compulsive, trapped in his apartment, or the twins, Julia and Valentina, who when first we meet them sleep curled up together, dress exactly alike, seem to think each other’s thoughts and dream each other’s dreams. I haven’t decided yet what I think The Fearful Symmetry is about – different kinds of love, obsession, power. I’m going to want to reread it, and it’s one of those books that you immediately want to talk about with someone who has read it.
I can’t believe it has been twenty years since the shooting of 14 young women at the Ecole Polytechnique. I wish I could feel that things were better; I’m not sure they are. We must continue to be vigilant and mindful while there is still violence of any kind directed at any targetted group, whether it be women, Jews, Arabs, Christians, queers, or anyone, and while there is still fear and suspicion of an “other.” That unspeakable crime twenty years ago grew, in some part, from someone feeling that his entitlement had been usurped, that power had been taken from him and given to others whom he believed had no business in “his” place. Until we recognize that no human being has any more right to power, choice, success, or simply life, than any other, we cannot hope that such a crime will not happen again.
Affect
Ubiquitous
Irony
Socialism
Effect
Melancholy
Love – You can tell the mood when melancholy is more searched than love… :/
Integrity
Nostalgic
Pedantic
Well, November (nablopomo) has been fun. Somehow, I’ve managed to post every day for thirty days. The final tally for my class challenge can not be taken until midnight tonight, but at last count there was a class total of 206 posts, which is pretty damn good
The Guardian recently commented on British/Canadian author Jo Walton’s article about what she called the “cosy catastrophe.” Her thesis is that certain middle class British authors wrote about the end of the world in response to a loss that they suffered after the 1st and 2nd world wars, which brought about the disintegration of their class structure and the world as they knew it.
These articles reminded me of a strange “children’s” book by author Mary Wesley: The Sixth Seal. A few people wake up one morning to discover that almost everyone else in the world has been evaporated, leaving only teeth and hair. It’s an eerie scenario, and a very effective one. The implication is that some scientific experiment has gone awry, but there are hints, from the cover, and from the opening pages, that there’s some genuine Biblical apocalypse happening, too. The survivors are a nice middle-class woman, her children, her dogs, and the precocious, tiresome boy, Henry, who may after all be the new leader of the world. I don’t know quite what to make of it, but it’s actually quite a compelling read, very untypical of others of Mary Wesley’s work.
The Art House Fiction Project looks fun and interesting. Sign up, and they’ll send you a Moleskine notebook and a theme. You fill the notebook with story and some art, and it’ll be housed in the Brooklyn Art library.
