A Single Speckled Egg

This may be the first book of fiction I've ever read in which the afterword provided as much pleasure as the novel itself. The afterword to Lavinia gives the reader insights into the patience and careful scholarship that is required of a gifted writer who chooses to write a story based on a minor character in a major world epic. Lavinia is scantily drawn in Vergil's Aeneid, and the world she inhabited is one that is still shrouded in the mists of the past. From the first pages of the novel the reader is given to understand that while Lavinia is the creation of "The Poet," the details of her life are given substance by Lavinia herself. As the third wife of Aeneas and the mother of his second son, Silvius, Lavinia, at least in Le Guin's tale, is the loving daughter of Latinus, content to be the keeper of his Lares and Penates. But she is destined to bring about warfare when she and her father rebuff the suit of her mother's nephew because of the poet's words the poet in a vision at the sacred springs. The story is told in language that is poetic by an author who is as skilled in recreating an ancient world as she is in creating a new one. Once the reader is finished reading this novel and its afterword by the author, he or she will almost certainly head to the shelves to dust off The Aeneid to give it a re-reading.