House of Names
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster
"If there is a more brilliant writer than Toibin working today, I don't know who that would be" Karen Joy Fowler, Irish Times
"Tóibín creates suspense out of the simplest emotions: fear, love and, most poignantly, regret" TIME
From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm Tóibín comes this ambitious, violent and modern retelling of one of our oldest and most enduring stories.
I HAVE BEEN ACQUAINTED WITH THE SMELL OF DEATH.
Judged, despised, cursed by gods she has long since lost faith in, the murderess Clytemnestra tells of the deception of Agamemnon, how he sacrificed her eldest daughter - her beloved Iphigenia - to the Trojan campaign; how Clytemnestra used what power she had, seducing the prisoner Aegisthus, turning the government against its lord; plotting the many long years until her beacon fires announce the king's return ...
Electra, daughter of a murdered father, loyal subject of the rightful king, studies Clytemnestra and her lover with cold anger and slow-burning cunning. She watches as they walk the gardens and corridors of the palace. She waits for the traitors to become complacent, to believe they are finally safe; she waits for her exiled brother, Orestes, for the boy to become a warrior, for fate to follow him home. She watches and she waits, until her spies announce her brother's return ...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
T ib n's 11th novel retells the ancient Greek tale of Clytemnestra, who kills her husband Agamemnon to avenge the death of their daughter Iphigenia, and her son Orestes, who kills her in turn to avenge his father's death. The narrators of the novel are Clytemnestra, Orestes, Orestes's sister Electra, and Clytemnestra's ghost. Clytemnestra begins by recalling that, for one fleeting moment at Agamemnon's army encampment when eight-year-old Orestes was on his father's shoulder, and 16-year-old Iphigenia in her father's embrace, they seemed the ideal family. Then Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia (so he could sail off to war). Clytemnestra plots revenge. Back home at the palace, she seeks help from wily Aegisthus, who, though a prisoner, wields extensive power. When Agamemnon returns, Clytemnestra greets him with a hot bath and a knife in the throat. Later she discovers Aegisthus has kidnapped Orestes to strengthen his hold over her. Orestes takes refuge on a farm, while Electra remains at the palace haunted, powerless, craving payback. After brother and sister reunite, Orestes kills their mother. The novel ends with the appearance of Clytemnestra's ghost and the birth of a baby. T ib n refreshes a classic in part by imagining Orestes's backstory with his friend Leander in a key role and in part by depicting in stark prose vibrant settings, such as palace hallways where shadowy figures conspire. The result is a dramatic, intimate chronicle of a family implosion set in unsettling times as gods withdraw from human affairs. Far from the Brooklyn or Ireland of his recent bestsellers, T ib n explores universal themes of failure, loss, loneliness, and repression.
