Counting the Stars by Helen Dunmore (possible spoilers)

I'm not really big on poetry, but I really like Catullus for some reason. And I was inspired to read Counting the Stars after reading this review of it. Fortunately, I wound up liking it a lot better than she did!

I thought the book was really beautifully written. Some books aren't very long, but it seems to take you forever to read them and you sort of lurch forward in fits and starts with them, but this one just flowed. I've read other reviews of it where people were bothered by the colloquial language that was used; that didn't bother me since I don't assume the ancient Romans spoke like they wrote. All we know of them is of course what they've written, but I don't think they all went around talking like Cicero in his orations. So I was fine with Clodia saying things like "what a dump."

I think this book was all about disillusionment. The Clodia that Catullus is in love with here isn't really the Clodia of the real world, but the one in his head. Which I think he figures out, by the end. And in Dunmore's interpretation, she's pretty much a sociopath.

My illustration of one of the famous sparrow poems.

One odd thing I realized as I was getting close to the end was that I was far more affected by the story of Lucius and Catullus' relationship than that of him and Clodia! Because I could definitely see why he loved Lucius and saw him on an emotional level as being more his true father (though in a lot of ways, Lucius is really more maternal in manner). You never really do get what he sees in Clodia, since it's so obvious that he's got a different Clodia in his head than the one everyone else, including the reader sees.

Which comes back to love and hate, which is a theme throughout the book; how he loves and hates her. I think he loves her when he can see her as the fantasy in his mind, but when he sees the reality, the hate comes back again. Falling in love can be a lot about fantasy sometimes; I've observed this in my own life.