"Clytemnestra" Book Review

by Costanza Casati

In Clytemnestra (2023), Costanza Casati takes the infamously violent, savage, and ruthless female character from Greek mythology and brings her to life for a contemporary audience without the baggage of clichés and stereotypes that past writers (many of which canonically are men) have structured her story with.

This is a major danger of myth as a genre, where many characters (with, perhaps, the exception of the select few that any given author cares the most about) often become typecasted, their thoughts and actions which could theoretically be quite complex - if the original myth is put under a magnifying glass – are oversimplified, and so, marginalized. There are an array of other female writers working in the genre of Greek mythology retellings who have also become extremely commercially popular: Jennifer Saint, Madeline Miller, and Natalie Haynes, to name a few. I cannot speak to their work alongside this novel as I have not yet read it.

I have taken a lot with me from this book. Namely, a deep reflection on what it means to be a female leader, in the vein of maintaining virtues like strength and courage and resistance, while sometimes still having to do bad (or questionable, or controversial) things to uphold a standard of justice. Probably, this reflection would benefit from further reading on topics like Aristotle’s Theory of Just War, which I haven’t reviewed in a long time.

I’m rather ashamed to say that what I feel Casati does manage to do with this novel, and which is a literary tactic that I find to be extremely generative and effective, is force the reader to think about all the ugly compromises they have had to make in their own personal lives, which they have justified with personal philosophizing and self-made systems of belief to restore order and/or to make them feel as though they are living in a more equitable world. This is a novel of compromises and exchanges, and most broadly, compares those of the Greek King Agamemnon’s with his wife’s Clytemnestra’s. Casati holds a refracted mirror up to Agamemnon’s leadership of Mycenae, and later the Greek fleet in the Trojan war, and what readers see with Clytemnestra’s leadership style, who becomes Queen of Mycenae, is a negative image of the landscape photograph of Agaememnon’s reign. In other words, reflected in the actions and decisions of her leadership, are the blind spots of male privilege and hypocrisy that pervade this time. The novel is situated, though retold, in the context and era of the Greek tragedies, like Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, the first play in a trilogy called The Oresteia. This retelling, like Aeschylus’s play, is absolutely a tragic work.

A moving, and arguably the most moving aspect of this work, is the character development and evolution of Clytemnestra that Casati charts over the course of the text. This could not have been an easy feat due to its lack of precedent, and it serves as the hallmark of glory that these retellings of Greek myth are at work doing: taking stories with characters, in this case a Queen, that have been marginalized and furthermore villainized in past versions, and imagining the characters with a shape of life and life trajectory that is more human, more relatable, provides something closer to the truth, and provides answers to several of the questions that arise surrounding this queen’s seeming exclusively savage act of, in the end, killing her husband Agamemnon. At the opening of the novel, readers observe Clytemnestra as a teen girl growing up with her sister Helen, later to become Helen of Troy, in Sparta. We observe her grow into her agency and the “hard decisions” that emerge over time. Casati creates a beautiful and vivid strong oppositional rivalry between Clytemnestra and the male rulers in her sphere of power, like her father Tyndareus and her husband Agamemnon.

As the novel progresses, while she is still yet a princess in Sparta and not yet a Queen of Mycenae, Clytemnestra begins experimenting with the boundaries of agency that she has inherited, and readers observe the emergence of her proclivity to right wrongs in an aggressive and somewhat questionable and controversial manner, thus inserting herself as a proactive agent and catalyst for redemptive change in the novel. When she orders her sister to cut the throats of the servants who led her first husband Tantalus to his murder and the murder of their son by her second husband Agamemnon, her father Tyndareus, incumbent King of Mycenae, declares to her that it was not her place to do so. In a powerful exchange Clytemnestra responds to his judgment of her act:

“You sit there, telling me about lives that were wrongly taken, after you helped a monster (Agamemnon) murder your grandchild.” (176)

Here, Clytemnestra calls out Tyndareus’ hypocrisy and in doing so illuminates the general male hypocrisy that pervades the palace and that compels her controversial, hegemonically speaking, acts of revenge. Casati provides the following description of Clytemnestra earlier on in the text:

“She felt a sick pleasure in knowing she was about to hurt someone who wanted to hurt others, as though she were straightening something crooked.” (64)

This description encapsulates well the impulse that compels much of her vengeful actions and decisions in the text.

Clytemnestra actively uses her agency to go against the wishes and desires of the “fates,” or the gods that preside over this region of Greece. She is regularly depicted as going against the will of the priestess who sits at the temple in Sparta and whose presence symbolizes in many respects the fatalism of violence and colonialist exploit that services the patriarchal infrastructure of Ancient Greece. Clytemnestra, unlike her mother Leda, repeatedly demonstrates a marked resistance against this priestess and the values she represents and embodies. She refers to the priestesses’ words as “dark” and Casati writes:

“Their mother has always believed the gods decided for most men, but Clytemnestra never accepted that. To exist in the shivering knowledge that gods could do and undo things as they wished: how could anyone live such a life? No. The gods are cruel and have little time for mortals.” (266)

With her acts of revenge, Casati’s Clytemnestra subverts not only the male hegemony of Ancient Greece, but also, and perhaps more importantly, she confounds the mortals’ preexisting relationship to divine order and the Fates in a productive way. In a letter from Penelope, wife of Odysseus, written to her cousin Clytemnestra, Penelope writes: “How unkind the Fates can be – to sacrifice a princess for the rescue of a queen? Is one life really worth more than another? And if so, who is the judge of that?” (341) Here, Penelope is referencing the priestess’s urge to the Greek fleet to make a human sacrifice before they leave for Troy, to ensure success in combat. Agamemnon chooses to offer up the daughter he shares with Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, for the sacrifice. The “rescue of the queen” is substantive for the rescue of Clytemnestra’s sister Helen who has escaped to Troy with Paris. This concept presents the defining paradox that stirs Clytemnestra’s actions throughout the book.

While I found both Casati’s plotting and pacing in this to be superb, her descriptive language shines as well. It is poignant, visually evocative, apt, succinct, and powerful. She really imbues the language with literal and metaphorical allusions to Greek cultural artifacts of the period from which she draws, and in doing so, makes the text come alive for a contemporary audience.

Casati also wields exceptionally maneuvered scenes of action and violence; they are commendable. She doesn’t, for instance, shy away from addressing the reccuring reality of rape in her descriptions. These scenes were, dare I say, rather unexpected; perhaps an implicit bias I carry with me when reading a female novelist. Another unexpected element is the level of compassion that Casati infuses in Clytemnestra’s character. She is not so completely ruthless, as she is often perceived to be from afar, and depicted as so in previous versions of the myths. It is significant to this text and Casati’s rendering of Clytemnestra’s story, that Agamemnon does not match her capacity for compassion. Clytemnestra is strong-willed and fierce when circumstance demands it, but she is shown to be equally as sweet as she is fierce. A strong example of this is the way she interacts with Aileen, her servant in Mycenae, a girl who has little to offer her on the spectrum of power.

The reccuring themes of compromise and exchange really do shade this novel, and as I remarked at the outset of this review, the highlight of this retelling seems to be its meditation on the idea that, simply put, in order to actually be a good leader, sometimes you have to be ostensibly a little bit bad. Clytemnestra’s mother, Leda, a more passive female character in the novel, dies from alcoholism, a paradigmatic sin of avoidance. Casati doesn’t make this version of Clytemnestra out to be a morally perfect character – she feels negative emotions like excessive anger and at times envy - but she certainly makes her sympathetic and compelling, and far moreso I would imagine, than she is envisioned to be in other versions of her character, as told in an assortment of Greek myths.