Cassandra at the wedding
By: Dorothy Baker ; afterword by Deborah Eisenberg.
Series: New York Review Books classics; New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 241
Subjects: Women graduate students -- Fiction; Mothers -- Death -- Fiction; Ranch life -- Fiction; Lesbians -- Fiction; Weddings -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction; Twins -- Fiction; Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.) -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, 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. 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 philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother. 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.
Notes: Originally published: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1962.