Kassandra

What it’s like

Measured, interior prose that moves like a long sigh over ancient stone: Christa Wolf's novel is written as the spoken reflections of Cassandra, the Trojan priestess, as she waits in Mycenae before her execution, so the texture is meditative and close rather than action-driven. Its world is dry heat, dust, bronze and sacrificial smoke, sea wind and the stifling corridors of a palace under siege, rendered through a voice that keeps circling back to memory, doubt and the question of how truth gets recorded. The mood is elegiac and quietly furious, with a slow, rolling rhythm of long paragraphs and repeated phrasing that suits a still afternoon or a late-night read in a quiet room. Violence is in the background: war, the fall of a city and the threat of ritual death are discussed and remembered rather than shown, with little graphic detail. Readers who enjoy reimagined myth, women's inner lives and the politics of storytelling, and who don't mind a reflective book with little plot momentum, will find it absorbing.