Review: Achingly Beautiful Short Story
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 9, 2010
The backstory, briefly, is this:  When that trollop, Helen, eloped with Paris, Prince of Troy ("Aphrodite made me do it!"); her husband Menelaus turned to his brother-in-law Agamemnon and oily Odysseus for help.  Among them, they assembled a massive fleet of a thousand ships, and prepared to descend on Troy to retrieve the straying wife.Now, Agamemnon had previously insulted the goddess Artemis, so she becalmed the ships in the harbor until Agamemnon should offer the life of his oldest daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the insult.  To lure the girl there for the sacrifice, Agamemnon sent a message that she was to come to be married to the hot hero, Achilles.  He hadn't expected that his wife, Clytemnestra, would insist on attending her daughter's wedding.This short story takes place mostly in Iphigenia's head during that period, with occasional flashbacks to her earlier life.  It is an achingly beautiful, appropriately disjointed account of the phrase "my entire life flashed before my eyes," from the perspective of the Trojan War's perhaps least regarded victim.I will remember it for a long time.