The KeyBy Benita Kane Jaro
Description
Historical novel on Catullus' life: perfect for those nights before the fire.
The first volume of a dazzling trilogy, The Key shows a world on the verge of collapse through the eyes of its greatest and most passionate poet. Gaius Valerius Catullus, the boy from the provinces who became the lover of the most powerful and beautiful married woman in Rome, is dead at twenty-nine. His friend Marcus Caelius Rufus must search for the meaning of his life in the slums and bloody secret cults, the palaces and law courts of the tottering Roman Republic. Vivid, exciting, carefully researched and beautifully written, The Key has been a cult favorite in hardbound for years. Jaro inserts English translations of and comments on Catullus' poems into the text of her novel, The Key.
Special Features
- Written with the most scrupulous attention to historical accuracy
- Contains some 40 poems of Catullus', in acclaimed translations by the author. Some have appeared in the recent anthology Catullus in English, and the author's original interpretation of the most important of them, poem 58, has influenced contemporary approaches to that work
- May be read independently as a single novel, or as the first volume of the trilogy The Key, The Lock, The Door in the Wall
- Features maps of Rome and the Empire, specially drawn for the novel
- Includes reader-friendly list of Principal Characters and a Chronology of Events in the novel
Teaching Tips:
The Key to Catullus' World
(a guide to using The Key with high-school students) - .pdf file 45k
- Includes correlation to national Latin standards
- The table shows the page in The Key where the poem is located as well as the number of the poem in the Catullan corpus.
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Benita Kane Jaro is the author of the Roman trilogy The Key, The Lock, and The Door in the Wall. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from California State University, Northridge, and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University, Washington, DC. Her interest in the ancient world began in early childhood and has continued all her life, as has her love of fiction, particularly novels. She lives near Washington, DC, with her husband, several large antique automated musical instruments, two carousel horses, and a lot of much-loved and misfiled books. |
Comments and Reviews
A convincingly imagined, well-researched first novel on the life and times of the Roman poet Catullus...[and] an inspiring, near-Byronesque portrait of Catullus.
— Kirkus Reviews The Key is a very poetic novel about Gaius Valerius Catullus...[It] is the most powerful account of Catullus and Clodia since Thornton Wilder's 1948 novel The Ides of March....The Key is...spirited, daring, at the end enigmatic and haunting, as was Catullus of Verona.
— The Classical Journal THE KEY...It does a good job of recreating the politics of the age...it provokes thought...
— The Classical Outlook If there is to be a worthy successor to Mary Renault, or to Marguerite Yourcenar, it may be Benita Kane Jaro.
— Doris Grumbach Press Release
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