"Odi et amo" [I hate and I love] -- Catullus's ambivalent feelings towards "his girl", Clodia, poured out in his Lesbia poems. This novel is the author's imagining of their passionate affair. Catullus is absolutely besotted and obsessed with the woman and she a brutal tease, leading him on into the abyss. There were a couple of subplots: one involving the death of Clodia's husband due to a possible poisoning and Catullus's search to find what poison was used and who might have committed the murder; also a section involving Catullus and his loyal freedman Lucius and a possible return to Catullus's home town to manage the family's property after the death of his brother.

I felt the course of the love affair has been overdone in literature. The most interesting part to me was the investigation. Even after discovering what kind of woman Clodia is, Catullus STILL believes her lies. Dunmore portrayed her practically as a psychopath, at least completely selfish, manipulative, and narcissistic and Catullus, a dupe fooling himself, caught in her toils. I hadn't time for either of them. Lucius and Aemilia, the slave, gained some sympathy. The story just flowed, with Dunmore's elegant writing. ( )

http://leftbeingrealistic.blogspot.com/2010/09/counting-cost-end-of-review.html

I am afraid to disagree with the reviewers below. I,loved Dunmore's 'The Siege', but this was just a very dull book. ( )

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.

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. ( )

An enjoyable historical story set in Rome about the poet Catullus and his love affair with Clodia. Although the love affair is doomed, more by the language used than any knowledge of the historic characters, there is plenty of narrative dynamic provided by the author's skilful portrayal of the characters and perceived motivation. I had empathy for the feelings of the slave and ex-slave characters and thought that Catullus was well realised.

My only reservation was about the use of contemporary profanities, although this is a difficult one and trying to use historic alternatives would have been worse! ( )

Posted at:

http://web.mac.com/ann163125/Table_Talk/Table_Talk_Blog/Entries/2008/3/29_Counti...

The Roman poet, Catullus is thought to have lived between 84 and 54 B.C.E. He was born in Verona, but lived for most of his adult life in Rome during the final years of the Republic. Just over a hundred of his poems have survived, including a series about his love affair with a woman he calls Lesbia. These tell the story of their relationship from the early days of heady passion, through a period where love and hate seem to hold equal sway, to a time of bitter and corroding self-pity as the poet realises that his love has been betrayed.
In her new novel, Counting the Stars, Helen Dunmore takes the story that can be traced through these poems and fleshes it out, filling her narrative with not only the characters that people the two households but also with the sights, sounds and even smells of a city falling foul of corruption and ripe for Caesar’s imperial picking. She follows the common assumption and identifies Lesbia as Clodia, the wife of Metellus Celer and sister of one of Rome’s most violent citizens cum politicians cum gangsters. The portrait she draws of this woman is not a particularly sympathetic one. While doubtless at that time Rome was a place where survival of the fittest was the primary imperative, Clodia really has no compunction when it comes to getting her own way and no real concerns when achieving that end means the hideous death of those around her. There is no doubt she lusts after Catullus, ten years her junior, but she does not love him. She is flattered by the poetry and exploits his infatuation to gain the emotional support she needs to bolster her as she sets out to achieve her own self-seeking ends.
For his part, Catullus becomes more and more aware of the dual nature of his feelings. The early poems in the cycle reflect his passion
You ask how many kisses
Lesbia, how many kisses will be enough?
Lesbia, count each grain
of Libyan sand that sifts
through silphium-rich Cyrene
count from Battus’ tomb
to Jove’s hot-blooded oracle;
or reckon up the stars
watching over the hidden
loves of humans while night is silent.
But later survivors echo his growing doubts
I hate & love. And if you should ask how I can do both,
I couldn’t say; but I feel it and it shivers me.
and finally his acceptance of the true nature of the relationship and of the fact that it is over
Wretched Catullus! You have to stop this nonsense,
admit that what you see has ended is over!
And all this Dunmore expands on and in doing so offers an exploration of many different kinds of human love. For not only do we watch the destructive passion between the two main characters we also witness the horrors that can be brought about when jealous love takes its revenge and, more hopefully, the very real, if self-sacrificing love, that Lucius, Catullus’s freedman, feels for the son of the woman who was his unspoken passion.
The story is told from Catullus’s point of view and in the present tense, reflecting the inability he experiences for the greater part of the narrative of seeing beyond the immediate moment and his need to be with Clodia now. It’s hard at times not to want to shake him and tell him to wake up and get on with his life. But you know it would be no use. Dunmore’s portrait of a man obsessed is complete and convincing.