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.
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Knowing, wise and a cracking read.
(Irish Independent)An important achievement...intoxicating fun.
(Lillian Smith)[Baker’s] ear for dialogue is acute, her prose immaculate...this is a novel of exceptional quality.”
(Times Literary Supplement)I—whose usual bed time is ten o’clock—stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding—dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist. I can only think back to Young Man with a Horn, and be overwhelmed by Dorothy Baker’s continuing brilliance.
(Carson McCullers)Belongs with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and McCullers’s Member of the Wedding as a modern American classic.
(Georgia Hammick)A brilliantly told story...remarkably subtle...inexporably lucid.
(The New York Times)'these marvellous books are witty and assured. Her tone is dark but jaunty, the writing off-handedly smart.'
(London Review of Books)*Cassandra at the Wedding was first published in 1962, but its freshness and immediacy place it with the best of contemporary writing. *A fresh, insightful, moving and funny portrayal of sisterly love.
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