#thinking of how her last four novels between 2004 and 2008 show a progressive blossoming of interest in classical literary traditions

[finelythreadedsky]

 On one level the book is about the life of a woman who is hardly more than a token in a great epic poem, on another it’s about how history and context shape how we are seen, and the brief moment there is to act between the inescapable past and the unknowable future. Perhaps to write Lavinia Le Guin had to live long enough to see her own early books read in a different context from the one where they were written, and to think about what that means.

-Jo Walton

#thinking of how her last four novels between 2004 and 2008 show a progressive blossoming of interest in classical literary traditions #following nearly half a century's worth of a career where she seems to actively avoid the influence of classical or medieval europe #idk. but i think this explains annals of the western shore as much as lavinia. #she gets so interested in what it means to share the same stories across space and time (and class and gender and nationality) #to be united in a community by having the same poetry #and in such an obvious way thinking about classics as a discipline is an incredible way to work through that #and i do think its an interest that must come out of having witnessed her own work unite people in community across time #if you're talking about the way stories and poems bring people together across time... #i read the texts passed on to me by renaissance humanists and 19th century philologists and byzantine monks and late antique scribes... #and they're the same across time and space but they're also not #and to have seen her own work reach people across space and time and be the same but also not... that must have been incredible #so: did living long enough to see her own early books read in a different context and to think about what that means #drive her to think about classical literature as she clearly was for the better part of a decade? #mine #reception #anyway i gotta think about this and email [redacted] tomorrow