* A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year
* Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe,
St. Louis Dispatch
From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm
Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra--spectacularly
audacious, violent, vengeful, lustful, and instantly compelling--and her
children.
"I have been acquainted with the smell of death." So begins
Clytemnestra's tale of her own life in ancient Mycenae, the legendary
Greek city from which her husband King Agamemnon left when he set sail
with his army for Troy. Clytemnestra rules Mycenae now, along with her
new lover Aegisthus, and together they plot the bloody murder of
Agamemnon on the day of his return after nine years at war.
Judged, despised, cursed by gods she has long since lost faith in,
Clytemnestra reveals the tragic saga that led to these bloody actions:
how her husband deceived her eldest daughter Iphigeneia with a promise
of marriage to Achilles, only to sacrifice her because that is what he
was told would make the winds blow in his favor and take him to Troy;
how she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner Aegisthus, who shared
her bed in the dark and could kill; how Agamemnon came back with a lover
himself; and how Clytemnestra finally achieved her vengeance for his
stunning betrayal--his quest for victory, greater than his love for his
child.
In House of Names, Colm Tóibín brings a modern sensibility and
language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character
new life, so that we not only believe Clytemnestra's thirst for revenge,
but applaud it. He brilliantly inhabits the mind of one of Greek myth's
most powerful villains to reveal the love, lust, and pain she feels.
Told in fours parts, this is a fiercely dramatic portrait of a
murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is
Orestes' story, too: his capture by the forces of his mother's lover
Aegisthus, his escape and his exile. And it is the story of the vengeful
Electra, who watches over her mother and Aegisthus with cold anger and
slow calculation, until, on the return of her brother, she has the fates
of both of them in her hands.
