Category Archives: arvosteltu

Ursula K. Le Guin: Lavinia (2008)

When I found out we’d be reading books in this course, it came to my mind that I could finally read a Le Guin book in English. I’ve read several of her books in Finnish but surprisingly not a single one in the original language. So which book would I choose?

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (born in 1929) published her first books in the 1960´s and became famous mainly for her fantasy and science-fiction novels, though she also has writen children´s books, poems, and essays. Especially in her science-fiction books, she creates completely new worlds and cultures with diverse people and nations. Even though I’m a huge fan of her fantasy novels (Eartsea, Annals of the Western Shore etc.), I decided to go with Lavinia.

Lavinia is sligthly diffirent from other books by Le Guin, for it is based on Greco-Roman mythology; Vergil´s epic poem Aeneid. The poem tells us the story of the birth of Rome and its founder, Aeneas.

Aeneid was written between 29 and 19BC, when Rome was dealing with major changes in social and political structures. Thus , the new emperor, Augustus Caesar, decided that it was time to re-introduce the traditional Roman values, which the Aeneid did, as it describes the heroic and loyal Aeneas fighting for the ”New Troy” in the west, as gods had informed him to do.

Aeneas was originally in Iliad and fought in the war of Troy: Vergil simply took this minor character and continued his story. Similarly to Odysseus, Aeneas flees from Troy and ends up sailing the Mediterranean searching for a place for the new capital. Years later he lands on the shore of Laurentum, where the story of Lavinia begins.

Just like Vergil, Le Guin takes a minor character and continues, or in Lavinia´s case, widens their story. In the Aeneid, Lavinia is hardly mentioned, but still Le Guin manages to create a whole life for her.

Lavinia (the princess of Laurentum) is quiet and modest person, as opposed to her counterpart in Iliad,the beautiful queen Helen of Troy. She loses both her brothers at a very young age, which traumatises her and her mother, Amata, who begins to despise her only surviving child. As her mother can’t stand looking at her more than a few moments, she turns to her father, who teaches her about politics and religious seremonies, despite that she can never inherit his crown.

Turnus, the first suitor of Lavinia, is the king of a neighbouring city. Lavinia can’t really say how she feels about him. In fact, she doesn’t have to make up her mind, because Aeneas kills him. Simple.

In spite off being the protagonist of the original story, Aeneas’s character is very, very shallow. The only things we actually know about him are told by Lavinia, he only seems to live inside of her. There is nothing to grasp, which is understandable, because a strong figure might have taken the spotlight away from Lavinia.

This could also represent their entire relationship: when they get married, she is half of his age (she’s 20 and Aeneas is about 40), so even if Lavinia does love her husband, her perspective might be a bit naive (I’m by no means implying that being twenty means that you’d be naive, but Lavinia is, for sure).

Le Guin also wrote Vergil in the story, as impossible as it may sound. He is almost done writing Aeneid, but gets seriously ill, and in his last moments he somehow finds Lavinia, and Lavinia finds him, although there is atleast a thousand-year gap between their lifetimes.

Well, Vergil does speak to Lavinia and tells her about her fate (marrying Aeneas, the mighty founder of Rome). They meet often before Vergil’s death, and then Aeneas already sails to the bay of Laurentum.

Vergil’s part in the novel is crucial. Even though the narrator is Lavinia, Le Guin makes it clear that Vergil is the writer. Because of this, the reader questions if Lavinia even exists. Maybe the whole book is about Vergil’s last thoughts as he clings to one of the least important characters in his unfinished story.

Le Guin’s text is always a bit tricky to read at first, even in Finnish. But after the first chapters reading becomes mostly automatic, apart from oldish vocabulary Le Guin seems to love (I checked about 15 words, which is about 3 times more than usually).

Lavinia is not a light novel. It’s sad, at some points. Lavinia has to bury not only her husband, but her child too. Amata commits suicide. Turnus is killed. All of this combined propably makes the book a bit too heavy for some readers, but Le Guin has never tried to write ”fluffy texts”. All of her books are filled with psycologial journeys inside of people, their beliefs, memories, and sexuality. And the beauty of life itself.

Wonderfully confusing and delicious, I’d recommend this to anyone who likes fantasy. Or Ursula Le Guin. Or books in general. You don’t have to know anything about Roman history to read Lavinia.

Like Aeneas is Lavinia’s imagination, and Lavinia is Vergil’s, and Vergil is Le Guin’s, perhaps the whole book is mine. Perhaps I wrote this without reading the book at all. Maybe the book doesn’t even exist. You got to go find it out.

When I first heard about this assignment I instantly thought I should read a book by J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter series has always been near to my heart so I felt like reading an another novel by her. Originally I chose The Casual Vacancy but I changed my mind quite quickly as I got a new crime novel by this praised new author called Robert Galbraith for christmas. It was later revealed to me that the book was actually written by none other than J.K. Rowling under the Galbraith pseudonym. I was instanly in love.

The Cuckoo’s calling is the first part of a series about an English private investigator called Cormoran Strike. The thing that separates him of the general ”detective type” is the way he’s presented in the story. The usual kind of a private investigator is quite noble and aristocratic, such as Sherlock Holmes, but in this case the main character is kind-of vulnerable, worn-out and dirty. In addition to him being a little messy, having a poor sense of style, a bad hairdo and a lot of financial problems he has even lost his leg in a battle in the Afghan war. All this together and a little bit of irritation between his skin and the prostesis, plus a recently broken engagement with his girlfriend, gives a pretty good image of the character. He is teamed up with his temporary secretary Robin Ellacot, a 25-year-old newly engaged Yorkshire girl, who has recently moved to London since becoming engaged. She is very interested in assisting a detective and turns out quite clever and comptent for the job.

In the beginning of the novel Strike is hired by a lawyer, John Bristow, who wants Strike to take a closer look to the death of Lula Landry, his adopted sister. Landry was a very succesful supermodel who was considered to have committed a suicide by jumping off a balcony in the ”better” side of London. Bristow refuses to believe that his sister took her own life and wants Strike to investigate the case more thoroughly. At first Strike seems sceptical about the case as it has recieved huge media attention but as he dives deeper into the case he founds out very crucial things about the young model’s death. And as the plot thickens Strike has to interview several people from Lula Landry’s life including her friends, brother, uncle, bodyguard and personal driver. The more he digs in to the world of the supermodel the more complicated the plot seems to be. Depression, drugs, poor relationships, stressful job and a multi-million inheritance were on this poor model’s shoulders. No wonder it seems that she killed herself. And yet, Strike has to try to believe Bristow and find out if the death was actually a murder, even though his only motive seems to be the double salary he’s getting from Bristow, due to his financial problems.

The language of the book was quite typical English with a few exceptions of for example the Cornish accent of Cormoran Strike and the speech patterns of different characters in general. The way Galbraith/Rowling made the characters seem more realistic and authentic was also very impressive. I especially loved the little details in the speech of the characters. For example ”how do you do” changed into ”how d’you do” etc. Lovely isn’t it?

And now to the critical part. The one thing I found somehow annoying whilst reading was the fact that every interview seemed to follow the same kind of a pattern; the detective is located in a restaurant (or a bar) and the person to be interviewed arrives at the scene. The questions are usually about the night of the death or the day before. It almost felt like Rowling was trying to get rid of the Harry Potter -type of ”monotonous” storytelling and move on to more complex dialogues. Even though J.K. Rowling is one of my favorite authors I must say that I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed her other works, but still the book was pretty addictive. For real it was easy to read 70 pages a day without getting bored or falling asleep. Trust me I’m a slow and a lazy reader.

For the first work of crime fiction by J.K. Rowling this book was well executed. Soon after publishing The Casual Vacancy there suddenly started to be a lot of fuss about her writing a crime novel. Now that she has done it under the pseudonym, that was later revealed, I think that it couldn’t have impacted the public better, at least from a profitable point of view. In this case Rowling was truly a master of surprise and totally baffled her readers with this brief but neat vanishing trick.

From the deadly fall off the blacony to the poor father-son relationship between Cormoran and his dad, the story was an engaging, unique and thrilling reading experience. It would’ve been almost excellent without these small annoying repetitions and patterns it followed (still very usual in crime fiction). Nonetheless it was a story well-told and to be honest I’m looking forward to reading the sequel. Marvellous work J.K. Rowling, marvellous work indeed.

I have read this book in finnish in seventh grade, but I didn´t realize it until I had read like 50 pages. The fact that I had read this book didn´t bother me cause it is really a pleasure to read it all over again. The book tells a story about few friends who lives together, because their parents are dead. These boys are called Ponyboy, Sodapop and Darry. The book tells about teenagers who are in different gangs and have a little bit of conflict with each others. The gangs are called Socs and Greasers, boys mentioned before belong to the Greasers. There are also other boys in the greasers such as Johnny, Steve , Dallas and Two-Bit.
There were many things I really enjoyed while reading this book, but after a little bit of reading I started to notice how great these characters were. There were so many similar characters, like for example whose basic life story is being a rebel and so on, but in a way every character stood out by being so unique. That was the most admirable thing I noticed while reading this book, but one other thing stood out as well. This book is frightening brutal and realistic, it wont try to hide anything instead it tells a story as cruel and realistic as it can be told.
When I made a little background check about the writer I was actually suprised, because the writer was at the age of 19 when she wrote this book. Other thing that stood out as well was that this book really divides oppinions because of its gang violence and underage smoking and drinking.
If you are looking for a novel The Outsiders is a great one. As it says on the cover ”A revealing novel about teenagers by a teenager” and every word in this book is there for a reason and tells one of the most beatiful stories ever told.