I remember Aeneas' words as I remember the poet's words. As Lavinia says in contemplating the telling of their story: The magic here is that we get to watch Aeneas's story unfold from Lavinia's point of view.

He's got bigger things to worry about, such as making landfall in a country where gods have told him to found a new city. Since escaping Troy, Aeneas has put behind him the love of Queen Dido of Carthage. That stranger is, of course, the defeated Trojan warrior Aeneas.

He proceeds to tell Lavinia (and the reader) the CliffsNotes version of The Aeneid:īasically, says Virgil, her distant relative Turnus, the king of a nearby territory, desires to marry her, but instead Lavinia will wed a stranger arriving with a fleet of ships on a nearby coast.

Le Guin's delightful new novel, Lavinia, goes back more than 2,000 years, borrowing from Virgil's Latin epic, The Aeneid.Īs he lies dying aboard ship off the coast of Italy, Virgil appears to a young Italian princess named Lavinia, a character whom he himself creates at the outset of his poem. The triumphant paradox here is that in their dying Oates brings these writers ferociously back to life, even if she goes a bit far with a poem-spouting robot programmed to keep the personality and poetry of Emily Dickinson alive and running. The author winds up dying madly - and just as pathetically - as the other men on Oates' roster: Twain has a haunting rendezvous with adolescent girls in New York's Central Park James falls in love while caring for veterans suffering in a London hospital Hemingway meets his end in a string of paranoid fantasies. Take Poe's hallucination about a lighthouse in Patagonia: Oates conjures up horrors as fine and frightening as anything in his actual work, suggesting that her imagination is certainly Poe's equal. These new, final chapters in their lives grow out of Oates' own reading of personal papers and biographies, and each of the stories becomes distinctive and gripping. Her fiction focuses on the last days - and, in one case, a crazy sort of rebirth - of five writers: Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. Oates' new collection of stories, Wild Nights!, lives up to its title, which she borrows from Emily Dickinson.

Lavinia le guin