Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
280 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 22 to December 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
This now might be second only to The Left Hand of Darkness as my favorite Le Guin novel -- which makes it all the more melancholy that it may well be her final novel. I've always had a difficult time articulating how and why Le Guin's work excels the way it does; my reviews of her books always seem to be shorter than the books merit. I go on and on about the tender humanity of Peter S. Beagle's stories, when the same words would be equally apt with Le Guin. And Le Guin's social conscience, anthropological bent, and consideration of the larger human dimension surrounding her characters and stories expand the humanity of her work beyond anything I've seen of Beagle's thus far. Yet that scope, that inclusivity, that acceptance, that note of personal hope in universal tragedy -- it's hard to figure out anything to add to Le Guin's words, and I think, subconsciously, I leave her books to speak for themselves.
I had avoided Lavinia until now because, well, the publisher's blurb on the book jacket doesn't do it anything like justice. I picked it up several times, wavering, and put it back each time with the impression that it was a bit of YA trifle, something to be saved for after I'd gotten Le Guin's more essential titles behind me. (For instance, I have yet to read Orsinian Tales, Always Coming Home, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, or even Tales of Earthsea.) I only checked it out this time in order to have a short novel on hand to help with my final effort to pad out my book numbers for the year. Almost from the first page, however, the gentle, inexorable tragedy of Lavinia -- a self-aware literary creation, visited by her poet in his dying dreams, never given a voice but possessed of one regardless -- swept me in, rich and aching with the consolation of heartbreak and the fragility of joy. I didn't bawl as openly as I did at the climax of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but it was a close race. The ending of Lavinia was just about as perfect an ending as I've ever read -- loss and release, life and its poetic imitation mingled in such a way that I couldn't stop crying, without being able to say precisely why.
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