Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

As a Percy Jackson kid, I couldn’t help but pick up Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati when I saw it on my local library’s shelves. This book immediately sucked me in with the poem that introduced Part One. I mean, “Kings are brilliant / mighty / godlike / Queens are deadly / shameless / accursed”? I was on the edge of my seat. Clytemnestra was such a page turner–I was almost desperate to find out what was going to happen next.

Clytemnestra is based on a story in The Iliad. Agamemmnon, leader of the Greek army, sacrifices his daughter to the gods for good winds. When Agamemmnon returns home, his wife, Clytemnestra, kills him in an act of revenge. Casati’s book retells this story from Clytemnestra’s point of view, starting in childhood and ending with Clytemnestra finally finding peace. 

Clytemnestra is one of my favorite characters ever. As a princess in Sparta, she’s never really given the opportunity to be soft, but she also doesn’t have any true, meaningful power. She’s in this odd in-between place that Casati does a great job exploring: how does a woman who has been consistently taught that she is powerful, that she is a queen, navigate a world where all her choices are taken from her by the men in her life? What does that kind of cognitive dissonance do to a person? Clytemnestra is angry, vengeful, sad, and carefully controlled. She represents the stories of so many women in a very nuanced way. 

The two elements that make Clytemnestra such a literary success are the third person narration and the palpable tension. The reader gets to know all of Clytemnestra’s thoughts and feelings, but there’s a level of separation between Clytemnestra’s inner world and the narration. This separation works really well because it allows readers to both empathize with and judge Clytemnestra. Readers are able to come to their own conclusions about if Clytemnestra was justified in her actions or not, but they are also able to intimately understand Clytemnestra’s reasons. Personally, I think that Agamemmnon got what was coming to him.

The pacing and tension in this book is expertly executed. I was reading the sweetest scene, and my heart was already racing, my eyes moving back and forth the page as quickly as possible. Nothing specific about that scene made me think something bad was going to happen, but there was tension in the story and tension in my shoulders. Casati does a great job at matching the emotional pacing with the plot pacing. The switches between sorrow, fury, and numbness either perfectly match or perfectly contradict Clytemnestra’s actions or the actions of others. Clytemnestra was such a roller coaster (in the best way possible), even though I knew the ending. Nothing that happened in this book was a surprise, but everything was impactful. I cried at character deaths that were mentioned in the book blurb. It takes such skill to write something truly heart-changing, truly lingering, without relying on surprise at all. 

Clytemnestra changed the way I think about women in history and women in mythology. I absolutely loved this book, and I want to buy my own copy to annotate. This is the kind of book that makes you just stare at the ceiling for a while after you close it, trying to handle the heartache you’re left with. Clytemnestra has definitely made it onto my favorite books list, and I’d recommend it to everyone.

Thanks for reading with me,

Katie