Cassandra at the Wedding - Supernormal Reads

No cover — Dorothy Baker, Deborah Eisenberg: Cassandra at the Wedding (2012, New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The)

256 pages

English language

Published 2012 by New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The.

ISBN:: 978-1-59017-601-6

(1 review)

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. 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. 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. 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 philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has.

First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring …

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. 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. 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. 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 philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has.

First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. 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.

12 editions

ralentina reviewed Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

A book I apparently loved but have no recollection of

4 stars

Content warning Medium spoilers!

I didn't expect to enjoy this quite so much. I picked it up without knowing what it was. Tascha bought it in our shared Kobo account, I think. At any rate I had downloaded it months ago on the tablet and decided to give it a try as I was stuck somewhere in need of a book.

The settings and the plot aren't very promising either. California, a Berkley, uber-intelligent self-destructive student going home to a artsy upper-middle class family. Two twins living in symbiosis for much of their life and then growing apart, suicides and marriages. Sounds overdone and conventional.

It wasn't at all. The writing is so elegant and witty, the main character complex and charming: self-centered, rebel, dramatic, profound, scathing and so so funny. It strikes me now that the book is exactly like her, and so perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek or self-ironic with its imagery and especially the suicide scene. As in: the drama is not really there, but it is if seen through the eyes of Cassandra, who is in her early twenties and feels like her sister betrayed her and that's truly the end of her world.

I also liked that Cassandra is a lesbian, but that, even if it is the 1960s, is really not the drama. Sure, it contributes to her feeling the odd-one in the twin duo, the one that doesn't have the option to just marry a respectable doctor and slide out of the family's bubble of excentricity and reproachable behaviours, and into 'normal' life. But she doesn't lack self-esteem, nor does her family seem to be troubled by the fact. And she just does girls without real interest, focused as she is on her family.

The other characters too are treated with respect. Judith and her husband, for example, are sweet and clever and cherish Cassandra in spite of her being impossible. Yes, they are more comfortable with convention, but also maybe having a healthy response to Cassandra (and her father) self-destructive behaviours. And the granny...she's a great character, so belivable in her air-tight love and problematic aspirations.

The quote below could be an excerpt from the millennial manifesto

'(...) I laid off and drank my coffee and thought a little about economics and aesthetics, moving from the very simple to the slightly more complex, and wondering how it would feel to have to pawn a guitar, and how it would be to walk around until it gets dark and somebody gets out of your studio and you can go back in and go to work. The things that get in your way, the indignities you have to suffer before you’re free to do one simple, personal, necessary thing – like work.'

Subjects

Fiction, psychological
Fiction, family life
Twins, fiction
Sisters, fiction
Lesbians, fiction
Marriage, fiction
California, fiction
Nevada, fiction