Title: Lavinia
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Year: 2008
288 pages
Audiobook & paper.
Its careful language shows it to be Le Guin's, but really, I'm not used to quite so much plot from her. It's an interesting stretch and I enjoyed how she pulled it off. It's not so much that Lavinia knows herself to be a fictional character a la, say, some of the characters in The Inkheart Trilogy. Rather, she recognizes that as a person whose story is told by someone else, she becomes fictionalized, her own details subsumed in someone else's needs for the shape of a story and a plot.
The section of the book up to Aeneas's death was excellent, and the section after was good enough, and perhaps I feel the difference because until that point I was comparing Lavinia's story to the story Virgil tells. I'm reminded of other Le Guin stories in which women are best able to tell their own stories after they've ceased to be the objects of male fantasy.
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