Christa Wolf

Cassandra

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Cassandra, daughter of the King of Troy, is endowed with the gift of prophecy but fated never to be believed. After ten years of war, Troy has fallen to the Greeks, and Cassandra is now a prisoner, shackled outside the gates of Agamemnon's Mycenae. Through memories of her childhood and reflections on the long years of conflict, Cassandra pieces together the fall of her city. From a woman living in an age of heroes, here is the untold personal story overshadowed by the battlefield triumphs of Achilles and Hector.

This stunning reimagining of the Trojan War is a rich and vivid portrayal of the great tragedy that continues to echo throughout history.

'A beautiful work.' —
Bettany Hughes
'
Cassandra is fierce and feverish poetry that engages with the ancient stories while also charting its own path. Filled with passionate and startling insight into human nature.' —
Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles
'Christa Wolf wrote books that crossed and overcame the divide of East and West, books that have lasted: the great, allegorical novels.' —
Günter Grass
'A sensitive writer of the purest water — an East German Virginia Woolf.' —
Guardian
'One of the most prominent and controversial novelists of her generation.' —
New York Review of Books
This book is currently unavailable
381 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2013
Publication year
2013
Publisher
Daunt Books
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Quotes

  • Ivana Melgozahas quoted2 months ago
    It was for his sake, whom I hated, and for the sake of my father, whom I loved, that I had avoided screaming their state secret out loud. There was a grain of calculation in my self-renunciation. Eumelos saw through me. My father did not.
  • Ivana Melgozahas quoted2 hours ago
    Cassandra, I suspect, defines herself as a non-murderer, as a non-maniac. Where does she get the desire and the strength to contradict?
  • Ivana Melgozahas quoted3 hours ago
    And literature, by describing this double code, has helped to structure it. As for Aeschylus, he is in all frankness installing a new morality, that of father right – without actually defaming the earlier belief in mother right, Valtinos thinks. All right, so Clytemnestra plays the hypocrite at first, she feigns joy at her husband’s return; but not in the service of a double code. (Which is why, later, I did not think it right that Peter Stein, in his stage version, has Clytemnestra speak in the tone of a Goebbels-style demagogue.) She wants to be able to do what she thinks is right.

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