Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays by Christa Wolf

Mar 24, 2014 Rowena rated it it was amazing

“Cassandra. I saw her at once. She, the captive, took me captive; herself made an object by others, she took possession of me.”- Christa Wolf, Cassandra

This wasn’t the easiest of books to get through due to its relatively dense prose but it was well worth the effort. In a way it made me realize that I don’t know enough Greek mythology, as well as how pervasive the knowledge of ancient Greek culture is in our modern society. However, not knowing too many particulars of the Trojan War, which is th “Cassandra. I saw her at once. She, the captive, took me captive; herself made an object by others, she took possession of me.”- Christa Wolf, Cassandra

This wasn’t the easiest of books to get through due to its relatively dense prose but it was well worth the effort. In a way it made me realize that I don’t know enough Greek mythology, as well as how pervasive the knowledge of ancient Greek culture is in our modern society. However, not knowing too many particulars of the Trojan War, which is the backdrop of this book, didn’t dampen my experience whatsoever.

I’d never even heard of Cassandra before, the Trojan princess who the gods had given the gift of prophecy. Most of what I’ve heard of the Trojan war has been about Helen of Troy so it was a nice experience to witness the story from another woman’s perspective. Although the gods give Cassandra the gift of prophecy, they make it so that nobody believes her prophecies. She foresees the fall of Troy and her own death.

What I realized while reading this famous story from a woman’s point of view is the importance of the feminist perspective when it comes to talking about just about anything, but history is what came to mind more strongly here. This perspective often recounts a more painful history, one where the pain isn’t kept at a distance or hidden away. In this case, this is a story recounted by a woman who was in the midst of the action. It was more painful shown this way and it clearly highlighted all that women had to deal with, matters of the heart, feelings of helplessness and so on. I found so much that would probably have been ignored or glossed over had it been written from a male perspective. However, in this case the rapes weren’t omitted, neither was the violence against women. The entire women’s experience was highlighted and that’s probably the reason why I read this as slowly as I did, it was slightly overwhelming to tell the truth.

This book was definitely feminist in its approach. It also showed the patriarchal nature of war. Cassandra could easily stand as a symbol of all women, especially those who are oppressed and don’t have a voice. Cassandra is intelligent, observant, and well-learned, yet still finds it impossible to convince people of her views, all because she’s a woman. It didn’t matter that Cassandra was a princess, she still didn’t have much say, led a claustrophobic life and was a pawn.

The book ended with four literary essays written by Wolf. I’m interested in inspiration and how people get their ideas, especially their writing ideas. The essays were a great way of learning how Wolf was inspired to write about Cassandra while reading Aeschylus’s Oresteia while in Greece:

“What does it matter if you do not believe me?
The future will surely come.
Just a little while
And you will see for yourself.”

-Cassandra, in Aeschylus, Oresteia

This book reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Great story, one that I’d read again. ...more

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Mar 14, 2018 Lyn Elliott rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2018-best, war, translation, myth-and-folk-tale, germany

Cassandra A Novel and four Essays
Christa Wolf

Read April 2018

Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays had such an impact on me when I read it earlier this year that I have re-read it and taken copious notes.

It’s one of the most powerful books I’ve read. Wolf’s observations about war, violence and truth are just as applicable today as they were in ancient times or in central Europe in the 1980s. The essays following the novel are just as significant as the novel itself, as there Wolf reveals much of the ...more

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Jan 24, 2016 Neal Adolph rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2016-reads, woman-author, european

Several months ago I finished reading the novella in this collection and I wrote a review. It is below, under the line break. In the time since I have read the essays, though that has taken a good deal of time. I moved to Colombia and left the book in Canada, which delayed reading the last essay by several months, and I celebrated Black History Month, which meant that I set aside all literature by anybody who wasn't black, even if only for a month. There have been delays.

But the essays are fanta Several months ago I finished reading the novella in this collection and I wrote a review. It is below, under the line break. In the time since I have read the essays, though that has taken a good deal of time. I moved to Colombia and left the book in Canada, which delayed reading the last essay by several months, and I celebrated Black History Month, which meant that I set aside all literature by anybody who wasn't black, even if only for a month. There have been delays.

But the essays are fantastic, and I am a little sad to have taken so much time in reading them. Oftentimes they are unorthodox in their structure, and require re-reading of passages to understand just how they are moving forward, why they are moving in that direction, who the speaker is, what they are speaking about. Wolf didn't write for a simplistic understanding of her literature and how it developed - the story of how it developed was complex, and so was the telling of that story.

It comes with a great wide knowledge, a great wide research into the experience of women in history, and, as a result, is powered by a deep, seething, historical anger. How powerful is her frustration! It makes you stronger as you read it.

Essays are illuminating when they are well-written, when they play with the form, when they add to our appreciation of something that we love. While I would find it hard to argue that they are as stellar as the novella that they are attached to (Cassandra is a 5-star read), they are still very good, and perhaps an essential collection for anybody who wants to write one day. In fact, if I worked for a creative writing program, I would make this book - all of it - essential reading.

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I never expected to become a big fan of the great classics, though I suppose in retrospect my high school admiration for the art of Oedipus Rex was a good indication that I could love the epic poetry of ancient Greece. And somehow it turned out that, with a nudge from a good friend, I did. I loved The Odyssey, and The Iliad is perhaps the best work to give to somebody who wishes to become a pacifist. And then I read a book about the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Besparloff - a small collection of essays that only managed to enhance my appreciation for these great epics.

And now I have read Cassandra by Christa Wolf.

To say that Cassandra is a wonderful piece of writing I think fails to acknowledge the many remarkable things that Wolf has accomplished in having written it. Here she has taken the works of three incredible ancients - Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus - and discovered a character, Cassandra, hidden away in the margins, and then placed her in the centre of the fall of Troy. She, burdened by the powers of a seer, is witness to the destruction of her city, the murder of her people, the mastication of her body, many years before it is destroyed. She is the prophet compelled to speak out against the war mongering brought to the council by some unknown but trusted young man. She is the woman who is recognized as a traitor, removed from her seat of power in the council and prevented from influencing her father, King Priam, and then thrown in a cellar. She is violently disregarded, ignored, silenced.

To the detriment of the whole city.

Christa Wolf has written, by taking on the great story of Troy’s collapse, the narrative of women in the western world - that is, to be valuable, intelligent, essential parts of our communities who, for no reason other than patriarchy, have been disregarded, ignored, and silenced to the detriment of our whole selves. She has tied this to the beginning myths of our world - the origins of so much of our defining literature, the beach and walls from which Odysseus set off to return home and, lost for twenty years, recorded one of the great stories of the Western World - a story which has often been called Everyman’s Journey. She is wise in telling us about Cassandra from the perspective of Cassandra. Patriarchy is in everyman’s journey - either as victim or as perpetrator and sometimes as both.

I keep on reading novellas which tell so much in such a short space and continue to be astonished by them. After reading something like Cassandra, which is dense and powerful, intense, and sometimes a struggle, one wonders at why some even bother trying to write books that are more than 150 pages long. How lazy some novelists are, taking so long to tell so little, one thinks. Of course, this isn’t possibly entirely true - some novelists need the novel. But books like Cassandra illumine the power of brevity, or declarations, of compelling characters created in very few words.

This work is nothing short of a classic. The discovery of Christa Wolf will, like my discovery of Gabriel Garcia Marquez only a few weeks ago, surely go down as a landmark in my literary life. ...more

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Jul 23, 2018 Pam Baddeley rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, misc-non-fiction

This work deals with the well known story of the Trojan War but through the first person viewpoint of Cassandra, the most famous of the Trojan royal family's many daughters, who was doomed to prophecy the fall of the city but to never be believed.

The novel is unusual in that it doesn't stand alone - there is a lengthy exposition that follows it, which deals with the author's ruminations while travelling in the Greek world on a fact finding mission to develop her idea. I found most of that rather This work deals with the well known story of the Trojan War but through the first person viewpoint of Cassandra, the most famous of the Trojan royal family's many daughters, who was doomed to prophecy the fall of the city but to never be believed.

The novel is unusual in that it doesn't stand alone - there is a lengthy exposition that follows it, which deals with the author's ruminations while travelling in the Greek world on a fact finding mission to develop her idea. I found most of that rather rambling and not that interesting, though there were some occasional snippets of ideas and some light on the materials she had studied and which informed the novel. The work was published in the early 80s and the non-fiction part deals with the anxiety around the state of the Cold War at the time - not altogether outdated because the current political world situation is just as much a cause for concern despite the political changes. These non fiction sections do continue the novel's theme of the corrosive effect of war - that even if fought for principles, these end up being steamrollered in the interest of "winning".

The novel itself is a stream of consciousness style flashback as Cassandra waits outside the palace at Mycenae knowing she is about to be murdered and that Agamemnon, her captor, is already being murdered inside. As usual, no one believes the prophetess and she considers her whole life and various milestones along the way in a rambling discourse where it isn't always clear as to what happened when.

One thing I found interesting is the depiction of Troy as descending, during the war, into a kind of police state in which eventually anyone who is not "for us" in the sense of colluding with the various official lies is "against us" and subject to imprisonment etc - which happened to Cassandra. The official reason for the war - Helen's abduction - is a sham, since Wolf adheres to one variant of the myth in which Helen actually ended up in Egypt and never came to Troy, but the fiction that the war is about her is propped up by the men on both sides although they all know that really the Greeks are trying to get control of the sea lanes which belong to Troy because of its strategic position.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is the idea that women manage to eke out an existence despite the war, with their own alternative society off in the hills away from the city, and that Cassandra had a relationship with Aeneas, the man who, in Roman legend, founded Carthage. I didn't find her reason for not escaping with him, his father and various others they take to safety just before the city's fall, particularly convincing - (view spoiler) Especially as she had already suffered sexual abuse by the male priest of Apollo (as his "right" since she is a priestess of the god) and being married off to someone who brought soldiers to fight on Troy's side.

Inasmuch as most of the men seem to be waging a war against women more than against each other, the work can be considered feminist although Cassandra herself never succeeds in challenging the status quo effectively and is silenced more and more as the war drags on. Ultimately it is rather a downbeat tale, but then it is a Greek tragedy - the slant which Wolf brings to it is to make it Cassandra's tragedy rather than the ancient Greek view in which she was a mere adjunct to Agamemnon's fate. Given the very uneven nature of the work for me, I can only rate this as 2 stars. ...more

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Feb 23, 2018 Tamara Agha-Jaffar rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2018-reading-challenge, ancient-greece-and-rome, 2018-women, books-i-ve-reviewed, fiction, historical-fiction, fantasy-magical-realism, books-in-translation, mythic-historical-retellings, owned-books

Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays by Christa Wolf, translated by Jan Van Heurck, presents the fall of Troy and its aftermath through the first-person point of view of Cassandra, a daughter of Priam and Hecuba, the king and queen of Troy. According to Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo after she promised to become his consort. When she reneged on her promise, Apollo cursed her so no one would believe her prophesies.

We meet Cassandra as she is about to face her de Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays by Christa Wolf, translated by Jan Van Heurck, presents the fall of Troy and its aftermath through the first-person point of view of Cassandra, a daughter of Priam and Hecuba, the king and queen of Troy. According to Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo after she promised to become his consort. When she reneged on her promise, Apollo cursed her so no one would believe her prophesies.

We meet Cassandra as she is about to face her death. She weaves descriptions of her current situation with flashes of the past. She describes the deterioration of Troy into a virtual police state, a situation that creeps up fueled by a war that generates fear and superstition among her people and within members of her family. She is horrified by the changes she witnesses in the behaviors and values of those she loves. She warns of the impending doom, but her voice is marginalized and eventually silenced. She witnesses the brutality of war, the deaths of family and friends, and the destruction of her city.

Through Cassandra, Wolf voices her opinions on the insanity of war and its corrosive impact. As the novel unfolds, we see truth manipulated to serve political aims. Hostilities force people into adopting positions contrary to their previous nature. Deceptions and lies are reiterated until they assume the strength of dogma. The whole fabric of society crumbles until what remains is no longer recognizable. In war, everyone loses.

One of the many interesting aspects of the novel is the way in which the women of Troy carve a physical and psychological space for themselves outside of male domain. There is a sense of sisterhood and unity among women. They share intimate details of their lives, soothe each other’s wounds with healing balms, administer medicinal herbs and plants, and interpret dreams. Cassandra finds solace and comfort in the company of these women, a respite from the male machinations in the palace.

The book includes a collection of four essays in which Wolf describes her travels to ancient sites in Greece and Crete. Cassandra’s vision and voice are never far from her mind and eventually take shape as Wolf treks through these ancient sites. Woven into her travelogue are her musing on Cassandra. We are given a fascinating glimpse into the mind of an author’s creative process taking shape as it is being informed by her travels, research, and readings of Classical literature.

Wolf’s writing is intense and powerful. She conveys her views with passion and conviction. The writing is dense and energetic. At times, it can pose a challenge to keep track of her meditations on Cassandra, on the fall of Troy, on the impact of war, and on the political upheavals caused by the Cold War during the 1980s when she wrote the novel. But it is a challenge worth facing because what emerges is the voice of a talented author with a profound sensitivity to the state of the world and the political turmoil that surround her.

Recommended. ...more

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Aug 17, 2014 Christine rated it really liked it

Shelves: matter-of-troy, minority-and-women-writers, literature-german

While the narrative style of the novel is not my favorite style, the story does eventually become engrossing. Wolf's story of Cassandra draws on several different veins of the Troy myth as well as references the Cold War. This edition includes four essay that give depth and feeling to the novel. It is an interesting look at politics and creation. ...more

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Dec 07, 2016 Melissa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: german-lit

Cassandra is most famous in Greek mythology for possessing the gift of prophecy but this unique gift came with one problem: no one ever believes her true predictions. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Cassandra says that she agreed to have sex with the God Apollo in exchange for the gift of prophecy, but when she went back on her promise and refused the Sun God’s advances, Apollo made sure that her prophecies would never be believed. When she predicts the future her friends and family treat her as nothi Cassandra is most famous in Greek mythology for possessing the gift of prophecy but this unique gift came with one problem: no one ever believes her true predictions. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Cassandra says that she agreed to have sex with the God Apollo in exchange for the gift of prophecy, but when she went back on her promise and refused the Sun God’s advances, Apollo made sure that her prophecies would never be believed. When she predicts the future her friends and family treat her as nothing more than a babbling and a raving mad woman. I have a distinct memory of first translating the Agamemnon and how difficult Aeschylus’s Greek is to unpack. But the parts in the narrative in which Cassandra is speaking were a nice break because oftentimes she just rants and raves; the various “oi” and “oimoi” noises she makes are a welcome respite from the complex grammatical structures of Aeschylus’s sentences.

Christa Wolf’s Cassandra is an ambitious novel in that it tries to cover the entire scope of the Trojan epic cycle by telling it through the eyes of this doomed and unlucky Trojan princess. Priam, Hecuba, Helenus, Achilles, Aeneas, Troilus, Briseis, Calchas, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Polyxena and Paris, are just a few of the characters that make an appearance or are mentioned in Wolf’s narrative. Cassandra, the narrator of this story, is the daughter of Priam, King of Troy, and his first and most favored wife, Hecuba. From a very young age Cassandra wants nothing more than to become a priestess of the God Apollo and possess the gift of prophecy. But once she is given this gift she is subjected to a plethora of other misfortunes which lead to her tragic death. Wolf’s narrative is so wide-ranging and covers so many characters and actions from the Trojan saga that it is impossible to mention everything she touches on in one review. So I am going to write about the aspects of Wolf’s story that were the most striking and memorable for me.

In the original myths and stories involving the origin of the Trojan War, Paris, the prince of Troy, visits King Menelaus of Sparta and with the help of the Goddess Aphrodite, absconds with his wife Helen. In order to get his wife back, Menelaus asks his warmongering brother, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, to help him get an army together, sack Troy, and find his wife. Wolf makes her story less a matter of love, pride and recapturing a straying wife and instead makes the inception of the war more of a political issue. Priam’s sister has been taken by the Greeks and there are three separate, and unsuccessful expeditions to bring her back; on the third and final ship, Paris sets sail with the other men and when he cannot get his aunt back he takes Menelaus’s wife instead. Paris is portrayed as an arrogant and brash young man who uses the pretext of the expedition to take for himself a woman who is said to be the most beautiful in the world. Christa’s Paris is much more bold than Homer’s Paris, but in both tales Paris has no forethought or concern for anyone other than himself.

When the Greeks attack Troy, Cassandra has already seen this event coming and predicted that it will destroy her home and her family. She has a dream when she is a child that Apollo spits in her mouth and this is the sign that she can foretell the future but no one will believe her. When she has one of her prophetic visions she foams at the mouth, has fits that mimic the symptoms of a seizure and drives everyone away from her because they think she is a babbling lunatic. Cassandra’s narrative about her childhood, how she acquired her gift of prophesy, the destruction of Troy and its aftermath are all told in a stream-of-conscious narrative. Wolf’s Cassandra constantly moves around between different time periods and this cleverly reflects the anxious ramblings of her tormented mind. She oftentimes dwells on her earlier years when she was first given the ability to prophesy and became a priestess of the God Apollo. She is King Priam’s favorite daughter and her position as favorite as well as her ability to predict the future cause her to have complicated relationships with her siblings, her mother, and other men in her life.

When Troy is sacked, all of the Trojan women who survive are divided up among the Greek Kings and taken back to Greece to become their household and sexual slaves. Cassandra is taken back to Mycenae by King Agamemnon and her interactions with this narcissistic man cause her to reflect on the other complicated relationships she has had with men throughout her life. Wolf portrays Cassandra as having a great desire to be a priestess of Apollo and remain a virgin, but even her desire to remain untouched is conflicted. There is a strange scene that Wolf includes in which all of the young women in Troy are placed within the sanctuary of a temple and one by one they are chosen by Trojan youth for a ritual deflowering. It is oftentimes the tendency for non-Greek, Eastern cultures to be portrayed as being more sexually open and even promiscuous. In the Ancient Greek myths Priam is basically described as possessing a harem with multiple wives and fifty children. Even though this is not necessarily emphasized in Homer, Wolf seems to pick up on the sexual differences between the Greeks and the Trojans. When Cassandra does finally become a priestess, she puts up with the head priest visiting her nightly for sexual trysts and she endures it because she pretends she is sleeping with Aeneas whom she loves very much.

Cassandra views Agamemnon as a self-centered, rash and dangerous man who is also sexually impotent. In Cassandra’s eyes Achilles is not any better a man than Agamemnon and she describes Achilles as a murderous, selfish brute who takes what he wants, including Cassandra’s sister Polyxena. The only male in the story that Cassandra has any positive thoughts for is Aeneas, a Trojan youth who is the only hero to escape from Troy when it is burning. In the ancient Greek myths Aeneas and Cassandra are cousins but they don’t have any real connections other than Cassandra’s prediction that Aeneas will escape Troy. I am curious as to why Wolf chose Aeneas at the only male in the Trojan saga with any redeemable characteristics. The depressed, hopeless, confused, Cassandra in Wolf’s narrative becomes a completely different person when Aeneas is around. The only time when Cassandra has positive, loving thoughts are when she is around Aeneas:

At the new moon Aeneas came…I saw his face for only a moment as he blew out the light that swam in a pool of oil beside the door. Our recognition sign was and remained his hand on my cheek, my cheek in his hand. We said little more to each other than our names; I had never heard a more beautiful love poem. Aeneas Cassandra. Cassandra Aeneas. When my chastity encountered his shyness, our bodies went wild. I could not have dreamed what my limbs replied to the questions of his lips, or what unknown inclinations his scent would confer on me. And what a voice my throat had at its command.

One final male in the story that is not portrayed in a positive light is Hector, the prince of Troy and first son and heir of King Priam. In the Iliad he is, I would argue, the most heroic of the men on either side because he has a sense of honor and courage that no other warrior possesses. So I was disappointed that Wolf refers to him as “Dim-Cloud” and Cassandra remarks, “A number of my brothers were better suited than he to lead the battle.” To have veered so far off the mark from the Hector of the Iliad was disappointing to me.

When I teach about the God Apollo and Cassandra and her doomed gift of prophecy, my students always have a hard time with the fact that time and again Cassandra prophesies the truth but not a single person ever believes her. My interpretation of Cassandra has always been that she represents that person who tells us the very thing we don’t want to hear about ourselves or our actions that we continue to ignore. Cassandra is the classic case of being mad at and ignoring the person who tells us the truth and is honest but who we will cast aside anyway because the truth is too hard to bear. Wolf writes a spectacular rendition of Cassandra and brings to the forefront this allegory of ignoring our better judgement and the better judgement of others and suffering the negative consequences for it.
...more

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May 25, 2018 Aubrey rated it really liked it

Shelves: reality-check, antidote-translated, german, translated, reality-translated, r-2018, antidote-think-twice-all, 1-read-on-hand, antidote-think-twice-read, r-goodreads

3.5/5

There is and there can be no poetics which prevents the living experience of countless perceiving subjects from being killed and buried in art objects.

Wisdom against one's will. The gain of culture by the loss of nature. Progress through pain. The formulae which underlie [European] culture, spelled out four hundred years before our era.

This work is either the flawed results of a worthwhile premise or the worthwhile results of a flawed premise. Such is the inevitable conclusion wherever 3.5/5

There is and there can be no poetics which prevents the living experience of countless perceiving subjects from being killed and buried in art objects.

Wisdom against one's will. The gain of culture by the loss of nature. Progress through pain. The formulae which underlie [European] culture, spelled out four hundred years before our era.

This work is either the flawed results of a worthwhile premise or the worthwhile results of a flawed premise. Such is the inevitable conclusion wherever a self-described autonomous being uses "insanity" as their characterization of the utmost abject, a fount of lazy thinking Wolf falls into a handful of times during the course of both the narrative and the last couple of essays. However, since she doesn't formulate her clear crux in a way that depends wholly on that separation of her from the "delusional" other, I can pick and choose what I want of the insights she makes about toxic masculinity, war mongering, the military industrial complex as bears down on science, literature, the propaganda of the translation of ancient literature and evocation and historization of the select group of ancients chosen to prove to that 'white' people didn't merely crawl out of caves once upon a time and, by a combination of luck and sadism, conquer the world. Wolf may commit many of the dehumanizing mistakes she seeks to critique in others, but she has more self-reflexivity than the average white woman, enough to make what truths she sees about this hellscape of a globalized terror complex worth picking over.

[T]he various generations of translators have translated these differently, depending on their own moral views and interpretations; that is, depending on whether, unconsciously or not, they have sided with the man or the woman.

Do people suspect, do we suspect, how difficult and in fact dangerous it can be when life is restored to an "object"? When the idol begins to feel again? When "it" finds speech again?

The most important thing about your dream, Cassandra, was that faced with a completely perverted question, you nevertheless tried to find an answer. You should remember that when the time comes.

I never would've read this work if all I expected was some historical fanfic of the more ancient than average sort. Part of my problem with Medea was this its lack of context, as while the mainstream likes swallowing down its entertainment with as minimal indigestion as possible, I prefer that the author prove to me that they made the effort to know what they're talking about. A lot of reviewers got stuck on the gender issue, but my concern is how a bunch of white men keep driving civilization into the ground again, and again, and again, with more and more complexly rendered excuses and false choices and scientific/humanistic/socioeconomic jargon each and every time. I don't think white women would do significantly better, leastwise not while they're stuck in the white supremacist and cisnormative ideologies that compose the two part identity, but they'd at least be more sick of the bullshit and less likely to put up with it as a result. In 2013, I dropped out of college because my engineering career pointed the way towards making things that helped people murder other people for a living. And yet, I'm also insane (major depressive disorder to be exact), so shouldn't I be gleefully driving the world towards a penultimate end of rape and genocide and nuclear winter, laughing all the way? Life and death is what's the matter here, and if people mewl and puke because they won't see past their their dicks to the bigger picture of those on top putting those on bottom out to the radiation poisoning slaughter for the sake of a few books, they're prophesying more about their future than Cassandra ever could. The history and theorizing and mixed messages from the realm of ancient myth is all incidental. Society tells itself the stories necessary for the sake of its continued function. not moralistic functioning, or sustainable functioning, or emancipating functioning. Functioning. If our models are murderers, why so surprised that so are we?

To prevent wars, people must criticize, in their own country, the abuses that occur in their own country. The role taboos play in the preparation for war. The number of shameless secrets keeps growing incessantly, boundlessly.

So there was a time when the dead were sacred, at least to us; and I knew that time.

I could write a ten page paper about this, easy. However, as professorship is officially a dead path, I won't be doing anything more than the sort of amateur work I've been doing the last eight years. I may not be completely happy with this particular work of Wolf's, but it's certainly interesting in meaningful in the ways I hoped for when I began my rereading, and more importantly, I can use her ideas to develop my own and carry them forward into the future. Nearly four decades have passed since these recorded scares of the cold War, and it is Wolf's writing that broke through the crust of my having tutored in AP World History for the past few month sand brought home just how little has changed in the prose and the events from Minoan to Troyian to Grecian to German to now, and how there will be no future left if the white patriarchy continues its practice of human sacrifice on the scale of millions for the sake of capitalism and realpolitik. Mewlers and pukers saying that it's no the white boys' fault, ask yourself who is everywhere in the seat of power. It's them you should be moaning to, not me.

What meaning does this observation have for a literature which no longer wants to create large-scale, vital, ideal figures; no longer wants to tell coherent stories held together by war and murder and homicide and the heroic deeds which accrue to them? What kind of memory does the prose of Virginia Woolf require and endorse? Why should the brain be able to "retain" a linear narrative better than a narrative network, given that the brain itself is often compared with a network? What other way is there for an author to tackle the custom (which no longer meets the needs of our time) of remembering history as the story of heroes? The heroes are exchangeable, the model remains. Aesthetics developed on this model.

What if no one who works with weapons would lift a finger anymore? Then they would all unemployed. So what? you think. Better unemployed than dead. But that is not how they think, for they fear certain societal death more than uncertain physical death. These are what I call false alternatives. Their number is increasing.

...more

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Sep 05, 2010 Sarah Magdalene rated it it was amazing

This dark race is beyond help
for the most part you had to remain
silent so as not to be considered
mad like Cassandra, when you prophesied
what already lies outside the gate.

Goethe, 1794

Spent all afternoon immersed in this great book. So inspiring to read such a sentient passionate author describing so timelessly the horror and madness of war. Impossible not to identify with Cassandra, wailing hopelessly at the insanely deluded and doomed Trojans as they demolished their own fortifications to tow i ...more

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Apr 24, 2008 Nathaniel rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: no one

Recommended to Nathaniel by: a professor

While I admit the book is an interesting look and study on the re-imagining of a character, as a piece of fiction it fails in many ways. The story has no over-arching structure, more a series of random thoughts and anecdotes loosely linked together by a time period. The essays attempt to give a reader an insight into the author's working process, but these fail too for much the same reason: they don't necessarily show the reader how the author developed her novella, and also have no definitive s ...more

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May 14, 2017 Gill marked it as unfinished

I've read most of the essays, which I found interesting. I'm less impressed with the narrative, which is nowhere near as good as Medea. So I'm leaving this unfinished. Rather disappointed after her other works that I've read. ...more

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Apr 07, 2019 James Murphy rated it really liked it

Christa Wolf tells us this book began with a question: Who was Cassandra before anyone wrote about her? What she gives us as answer is this book made up of a historical novel and 4 essays about the character and her aspects as woman and myth. As we know, the Iliad calls her the loveliest daughter of Priam, king of Troy. A priestess of Apollo, she asks the god for the gift of prophecy, which he grants, but when she refuses his advances he punishes her by ordaining that her prophecies won't be bel Christa Wolf tells us this book began with a question: Who was Cassandra before anyone wrote about her? What she gives us as answer is this book made up of a historical novel and 4 essays about the character and her aspects as woman and myth. As we know, the Iliad calls her the loveliest daughter of Priam, king of Troy. A priestess of Apollo, she asks the god for the gift of prophecy, which he grants, but when she refuses his advances he punishes her by ordaining that her prophecies won't be believed, though they're always correct. A good bit of the tension of the Troy legend exists in her predicting that Paris's abduction of Helen will result in the destruction of Troy. The belief that Troy won't fall helps to dupe the Trojans into bringing the famous gift horse inside the city's walls. The rest, as they say.... After Troy has been sacked, we learn from Aeschylus's The Oresteia that Cassandra's taken by Agamemnon back to Argos as part of his spoils from the war. She's killed along with him by the wife Clytemnestra who still grieves for her daughter Iphigenia, sacrificed by Agamemnon so the gods would give him wind to propel the Greek fleet to Troy. The novel tells this old story through Cassandra. All the familiar characters and key actions are remembered. Because we're so well-acquainted with those characters and their relationships to the gods, their motivations and the lessons learned from the destruction of Troy, for me the novel was the least interesting part of the book.

I like the 4 essays. The 1st two are a kind of travelogue describing a trip Wolf took to mainland Greece and Crete. She's looking for Cassandra in the rustic atmosphere and splendid archaeological sites of 1980s Greece, and I thought both essays thoroughly interesting. The 3d essay is in the form of a journal meditating on Europe, history, and how ancient Greece has continued to have an impact. The times--1980 and '81--with its tensions between the Warsaw Pact and NATO and the shrill perception of a movement toward war on the continent allows her to develop a consideration in which modern Europe parallels Greece/Troy. In writing about the dangerous leanings toward war, Wolf herself seems to take on the role of a present-day Cassandra. Last is a letter explaining her own relationship to Cassandra and to other depictions of her story, particularly that of Goethe. Though a little above my head, to me it rounds out the picture Wolf has given us of Cassandra and defines her position within fiction, myth, archaeology, and ancient history, a position also pointed out, I understand, by Robert Graves. But Wolf uses the position to look backward to women as shapers of history while anticipating the feminism of our time. ...more

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Feb 21, 2019 Caitlin rated it it was ok

Shelves: book-riot

I read, skimmed, and skipped ahead, so a page number is difficult to identify.

Too dry, and unfocused. It felt like nothing much was happening, and even what did happen, I didn't feel connected to. Cassandra is about to die, looking back on her life. She was cursed with prophecy no one would believe, so her end is inevitable, but she meets it without much emotion.

The essays that follow are more of the same, adrift and difficult to focus on. ...more

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Oct 01, 2019 David added it

Shelves: new-in-2019

A difficult and different book. I expected to find the Cassandra narrative more interesting than the non-fiction commentary, but was surprised. An important book for the consideration of how women are represented in literature (and culture at large). At the same time, it’s fascinating to read the certainty with which Wolf asserts an irreconcilable double-Germany less than a decade before the collapse of The Wall.

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Nov 01, 2018 Julia rated it really liked it

Shelves: to-reread

I loved the imaginative language of this novel and Cassandra's perspective on her own struggles and mistakes. So many thought-provoking sentences and passages - will definitely reread this one. ...more

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May 30, 2019 Steve rated it really liked it

Shelves: international, cult-books

This was a wonderful and multi-layered retelling of the Trojan War through the eyes of Cassandra, the seer cursed to have no one believe her prophecies. The brief novel is accompanied by four essays that show the author traveling to Greece to do research, then returning to East Berlin to mull over what a woman's voice should say to a male-centric civilization hell bent on destruction, regardless of whether anyone listens. ...more

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Mar 04, 2016 Julia Buckley rated it it was amazing

Christa Wolf's stream-of-consciousness account of the mythological Cassandra, imprisoned and waiting to be executed by the vengeful Clytemnestra, is a fascinating study of an ancient world, of patriarchy, and of a universal humanity.

The novel is not broken into chapters, but that is an appropriate way to chronicle the relentless thoughts that torment Cassandra in her prison. Ultimately, despite the necessarily grim tone surrounding details of the Trojan War, there is something victorious in Cas ...more

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Jan 02, 2018 Michelle rated it really liked it

Shelves: favourites, books-i-own

4.5 stars

While this book did drag on a bit near the end, this was an incredible read. Wolf rewrites the story of the Trojan war from Cassandra's perspective, all the while combining elements from Athenian playwrights and other writers through the ages, and writes the Trojan war as a realistic event in history. In the second half of this book, she writes about how these characters took hold in her mind and the questions they posed as she travelled through Greece to do research.

While I would recom ...more

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Jan 11, 2008 Rochelle rated it it was amazing

Shelves: essays, readforschool

This text is an imaginative repositioning of the classical tragic figure Cassandra. In this telling, Cassandra transforms from a privileged and unaware royal daughter to rebellious witness who refuses to go along with the false rhetoric of war that her own family is perpetrating. She finds herself spending time in the forest in a kind of utopian/feminist/egalitarian community where people have created a space between all of the killing and dying. The story is incredible and moving and is a perfe ...more

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Sep 18, 2016 Maijabeep rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, feminism

The novel itself is gripping, and it alone probably would have been five stars from me.

The travel journal, diary and letter addenda are interesting, and it is fun to trace the roots of the novel in Wolf's thoughts, but I thought those roots were overly buried in minutiae that made the sections difficult to read. I think it would have been better to have heard them as her lecture series, to see how Wolf herself connected the strands together into her novel. ...more

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Jul 25, 2020 Bagus rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, references, mythology, books-i-own, philosophy, essays, east-germany, 2020-read, historical-fiction, germany

In 1980, the distinguished East German writer Christa Wolf took a trip to Greece along with her husband, Gerhard. As an East German citizen, she’s one of the few privileged to be able to travel outside of the DDR and the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War. Her encounter with Cassandra began as she begins to read Aeschylus’s ‘Oresteia’ upon waiting for her flight to Greece at Berlin Schoenefeld airport. She wrote in her accompanying essay, “Before Cassandra opens her mouth we have learned In 1980, the distinguished East German writer Christa Wolf took a trip to Greece along with her husband, Gerhard. As an East German citizen, she’s one of the few privileged to be able to travel outside of the DDR and the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War. Her encounter with Cassandra began as she begins to read Aeschylus’s ‘Oresteia’ upon waiting for her flight to Greece at Berlin Schoenefeld airport. She wrote in her accompanying essay, “Before Cassandra opens her mouth we have learned: The war against Troy is over.” And furthermore, “Whose side is Aeschylus on, really?”

Actually I was not really familiar with Greek mythology. In fact, probably this is my first time to encounter the narrative written about the Trojan War. And what makes this retelling special is that it was told through the point of view of Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy who prophesied the disaster of her city by an attack from the Greek. For centuries in the past, there have been many works of literature written in this topic, however, most of them are written by men such as Homer, Aeschylus, and so many other writers since the Greek antiquities era until the modern ones.

That fact will then beg an important question for the starting point of this book:

‘Who was Cassandra before people wrote about her? (For she is a creation of the poets, she speaks only through them, we have only their view of her… This, too, is one of the trails I must follow up, until another trail branches off that I must follow, until the third compels me to let go of the second.) What I would like is to communicate to you the feeling which has induced my restlessness—a restlessness which this letter no doubt reflects.’

And to answer that question, she took a different approach to retell the story of the siege of Troy through the viewpoint of Cassandra, the woman whose voice was silenced and her prophecy were ignored which resulted in the disastrous conquest of Troy by the Greek.

‘If only I were he. If only I could exchange my sex for his. If only I could deny it, conceal it. Yes, really, that is how I felt….. How differently I would have spoken, I would have laid down the law in quite a different tone; I would have liked to teach them something quite, quite different, those unsuspecting, easily satisfied people—namely . . . Namely? What would I have taught them then?’

I like the depth of the reinterpretation of this story in which Christa Wolf has taken a radical approach through the aid of archaeological findings, the existing literary works, as well as her own observations of the culture in practice by the Greek contemporaries. She took notice of not only the transitional custom by which a suitor steals a princess for it is only the woman who could confer the throne (as shown by Paris’s abduction of Helen), but also the economic value of the conquest of Troy which was located in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). The Greek would surely benefit the control of Bosphorus by conquering Troy, which will increase their prestige in the Mediterranean Sea.

Also, we could not ignore the fact the Christa Wolf was an author living her life as an East German citizen during the time she wrote this piece. We could take the cue of her life in the DDR as a mirror of Cassandra’s experience during the Trojan War living in a police-state-like Eumelos’ Troy. Censorship is a common phenomenon in East Germany, and in fact, even this book was censored by the time it was published for the first time in 1983. Even though the narrative is disguised in the form of Greek mythology retelling, there is still some hidden voices of Cassandra in this book criticising repression, as well as the marginalisation of women in the society. Cassandra’s voice as an individual woman is rather symbolic as unheard voices of women throughout the ages.

This is a highly readable book, and indeed insightful, even for me who was unfamiliar with Greek mythology. This edition which also contains 4 essays that Christa Wolf presented during her lectureship at the University of Frankfurt in 1982 by the time she was still writing the draft of ‘Cassandra’ is a good choice to read, as we can see more her creative process in finding the voice for Cassandra’s character and also its implications to the voice of women in the modern context. ...more

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Feb 18, 2021 Marije de Wit rated it it was amazing

Wow. Not ‘just’ a feminist retelling of the myth of Cassandra, whose internal monologue takes us along in her observations of life in the Trojan war. In the accompanying essays, Wolf speaks about the research and writing process of the novel and, alongside, reflects on writing in general, its relation to society and the male centeredness of the history of literature. Especially in the third essay, she also meditates on her own life in Eastern Germany during the cold war, and the omnipresence of Wow. Not ‘just’ a feminist retelling of the myth of Cassandra, whose internal monologue takes us along in her observations of life in the Trojan war. In the accompanying essays, Wolf speaks about the research and writing process of the novel and, alongside, reflects on writing in general, its relation to society and the male centeredness of the history of literature. Especially in the third essay, she also meditates on her own life in Eastern Germany during the cold war, and the omnipresence of the threat of a nuclear war. In musings on, and revaluations of power and heroism, parallels between ancient times and Wolf’s own time surface - and the doors are wide open to let them resonate to our present and future.

From the essays:

“ ‘To learn through suffering’- this seems to be the law of the new gods, and likewise the way of masculine thought. This way does not seek to love Mother Nature but to fathom her secrets in order to dominate her, and to erect the astounding structure of a world of mind remote from nature, from which women are henceforth excluded. Indeed, women are actually to be feared, perhaps because, unbeknown to the thinking, suffering, sleeping man, they are co-originators of that anxiety of conscience which pounds his heart awake. Wisdom against one’s will. The gain of culture by the loss of nature. Progress through pain. The formulae which underlie Western culture, spelled out four hundred years before our era.”

“The classical Greek dramatist helped create, by aesthetic means, the political-ethical attitude of the free, adult, male citizen of the polis. The hymns, mystery plays, and saints’ legends of the Christian medieval poet also served to promote a bond whose two terms, God and man, were both responsive. The courtly epic has a fixed set of characters to whom it relates by praising them. The early middle-class poet addresses the prince’s subjects, stirring them to rebellion. The proletariat, the socialist movements with their revolutionary class-struggle goals, inspire the literature that accompanies them to concrete partisanship. But in the face of modern-day phenomena, awareness of the incogruousness of words keeps growing. The thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have in mind for us is unsayable; the language which would reach them seems not to exist. But we go on writing in the forms we are used to. In other words, we still cannot believe what we see. We cannot express what we already believe”.

“Worth pondering even today: how the criticism of one-sided male rationalism runs the risk of being wrongly interpreted as irrationalism, hostility to science, and also put to wrong use. This is particularly so in restorational eras, when the way to the Mothers becomes a relapse into resentment, an escape route from the analysis of circumstances, an idealization of more primitive social conditions, perhaps a lead-up to blood-and-soil myth. This in turn raises the question of what today could possibly still represent ‘progress’ (given the postulates of our civilization), now that the masculine way has almost run its course – that is, the way of carrying all inventions, circumstances, and conflicts to extremes until they have reached their maximum negative point: the point at which no alternatives are left.”
...more

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Jun 04, 2018 Rachael rated it liked it

Shelves: mythology-religion

From VarianceFiction

This book was not what I expected.

But I’ll back up a bit first. Cassandra was loaned to me by a friend who’d been assigned the book as a basis for his critical thinking class. Naturally, he hated the class, and the book as well. My friend, however, is not a reader, so I dismissed most of his feelings. I figured his hatred and confusion toward the story was a by-product of his frustration with the class. Judging from the blurb, I thought, this would be an interesting, fun read ...more

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Dec 18, 2020 Scott Cox rated it liked it

Shelves: european-literature, classics, fiction

It has been decades since I have read Agamemnon by Aeschylus. In that Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam of Troy and his wife, Hecuba. According to legend Cassandra was gifted as a prophetess by the Greek god, Apollo, who had hoped to win favors from Cassandra. However Cassandra subsequently spurned Apollo’s advances. In retaliation Apollo, unable to revoke his gift, instead cursed Cassandra causing her prophecies to go un-believed and unheeded. East German author Christa ...more

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Apr 26, 2020 Noémie rated it liked it

Less easy than Medea, I had to struggle with a dense prose and a unchronologic and sometimes eerie narrative. The way the the author depicts the madness and visions did not help.
However I very much liked the character, an engaged, dynamic and emancipated woman, discovering herself, understanding politics and existing by and through herself despite her people and family. I especially like the feminist take on the men portrayed in the book. Wolf delivers for instance a very interesting version of ...more

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Nov 23, 2020 Vesperia rated it did not like it

Shelves: can-t-finish

Here's a good summary of this book: "the ramblings of a disorganized mind".

What she says about the context in which the Iliad takes place is not new and what she describes as Cassandra's private life does not stand. Cassandra herself is unrelatable and not very likable which has to be bad since this whole mess is written in first person.

And it's just plain old bad writing ("'Don't talk rubbish,' said Priam."--write that one in your commonplace book). I can only assume it got such high praise be ...more

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Nov 12, 2018 aya added it

Shelves: retellings

ngl, i didn't Really finish the book bc i didn't get through all of wolf's essays. tbh idk if you needed all of them there. the part i really enjoyed (n was here for in the first place) was the 'novel': cassandra's monologue in her final living hours, reflecting on her life / the war in troy. she deals with issues of allegiances / truth / speaking truth to power that is probably not too far from wolf's historical context and maybe that's why wolf fell for her so fast. there's also always a lot t ...more

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Mar 08, 2020 Ryan Holmes rated it it was amazing

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jul 01, 2017 Julia rated it liked it

another one i largely abandoned during the quarter and didn't finish until now—essays were better than the novel because the novel is all ideas, & the ideas are more compellingly and urgently expressed in the essays. was charmed by the idea of a novel that doesn't feel complete if it doesn't have supplementary essays bound up with it, though. also had no idea the eighties felt so apocalyptic. it's pretty apocalyptic right now too but no one is so grave about it. ...more

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Nov 04, 2018 Melanie rated it it was amazing

Phenomenally speaks on themes of privilege, complicity, and the police state that resonate very strongly today, in addition to giving a unique and female twist to the mythology. Yes, it's confusing for the first 30 pages or so but as the puzzle pieces start to slide together, you'll quickly see that it's definitely worth it. ...more

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