Cassandra at the Wedding (New York Review Books Classics)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.89 (966 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1590176014 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-11-05 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Originally published in 1962, this is the compulsively readable story of Cassandra’s unwilling trip home to attend (or prevent) her twin sister Judith’s wedding. I can only think back to Young Man with a Horn, and be overwhelmed by Dorothy Baker’s continuing brilliance.” — Carson McCullers “Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding (New York Review Books, 2004) is another novel in which it’s hard not to be caught up from the very first page by the first—person voice of the speaker. “Knowing, wise and a cracking read.” —Irish Independent“An importan
She lives in New York City. Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short stories and a play. Baker died in 1968 of cancer. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Dorothy Dodds Baker (1907–1968) was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1907 and raised in California. The couple moved back to California, and Baker completed an MA
Baker's crafting of an "unreliable narrator" is worthy of greater notice The novel, Cassandra at the Wedding (first published in 1962), starts out simply enough; the first-person narrator, Cassandra Edwards, tells us that the spring semester has ended at Berkeley, California, where she is writing an M.A. thesis on the contemporary French novel; and she's packing a bag to drive to her parents' ranch near Tipton to attend her sister Judith's marriage to a truly lovable man. Not only is Cassandra a budding scholar, she's a talented pianist, and competitive swimmer, and she loves her sister more than anyone--even more than her sister's fiancee--so Cassie thinks. For this . "Intense, enjoyable, a bit quirky" according to Lewis P. Wilkinson. One weekend in California, a twin drives home with the intention of talking her twin sister out of getting married. Cassandra feels she cannot live without her twin, and even takes extreme action to prove it. Written from the perspectives of both sisters, this tight, well-written novel kept me reading way past my bedtime.. A Common Reader said An Astonishing Novel. I don't understand how this book could have sunk into obscurity: it's a powerful and beautiful novel, intense and absorbing, deeply layered--the kind that you want to re-read the moment you reach the last page, and one that you know you will return to regularly throughout your life. You'll have gained an idea of what the novel is about from synopses and other reviews, so I won't go into that except to say that, for me, it's most deeply about growing up, how there's really no end to the struggle to come into one's own true self--no end to the pain of it, nor the exhilaration of it.
First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Dorothy Baker’s entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. As she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has, Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosop