Books I Love - Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

From the back of the book:

Mother. Monarch. Murderer. Magnificent.

You are born to a king but marry a tyrant. You stand helplessly by as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore and comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own.

You play the part, fooling enemies who deny you justice. Slowly, you plot.

You are Clytemnestra.

But when the husband who owns you returns in triumph, what then?

Acceptance or vengeance – infamy follows both. So you bide your time and wait, until you might force the gods’ hands and take revenge. Until you rise. For you understand something that the others don’t. If power isn’t given to you, you have to take it for yourself.

Set in the world of Ancient Greece and told through the eyes of its greatest heroine, Clytemnestra is a tale of power and prophecy, of hatred, love and an unforgettable queen who fiercely dealt out death to those who wronged her.

I really enjoyed this story. Right from the start author Costanza Casati welcomed me into the world of the Spartans and later into the palace of Mycenae – neither particularly comfortable places to be. Told from the point of view of a woman, a queen, rather than that of the “heroes” of the classic Greek tales, Clytemnestra was full of passion and pain, love and rage, and ultimately vengeance.

The heroes are not heroes, the women are not weak, vain, and unfaithful to those who deserved their faith. This story is a glimpse into a potential human truth behind the myths that have been told for millennia.

One of the great things about this book is that I finally felt like I started to understand who was who in the world of Ancient Greece. I have known the names such as Helen of Troy, Agamemnon, Castor and Polydueces, Odysseus and Penelope, Leda, Elektra, Menelaus and of course Clytemnestra, and I have known the tales, but reading this book helped me to see that world in a more coherent way. The relationships Casati displayed in the book allowed me to start to put everyone into place, to really understand who was related to who and how. I loved her sharing of how they came to be in the situations we all know about, but more than that, I loved the story of why they found themselves there.

Casati’s writing feels both lyrical and evocative while still holding a ring of historical accuracy to it that made Clytemnestra a book that I couldn’t put down.

You can find Clytemnestra here.