Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella & Stories

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In this spellbinding novel, written in Albania and smuggled into France a few pages at a time in the 1980s, Kadare denounces with rare force the machinery of the dictatorial regime, drawing us back to the ancient roots of Western civilization and tyranny. This stomach-churning little horror story, with its catalogue of ways to render people blind, is impossible to put down. It reveals a world where fear is an instrument of power, but the individual survives despite the odds. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country contains a similar theme, with a play named Iphigenia at Ilium running through the novel as a leitmotif. I found his account of the power of literature incredibly moving and thoroughly recommend it (it’s worth checking out prize chairman John Carey’s speech in awarding the prize too).

Exploring a single letter was one among many devices used by Perec ( Life: A User's Manual ), known for his verbal feats. It wasn’t for a noble cause that Iphigenia was sacrificed, in the same way it wasn’t for a noble reason that Stalin’s son, Yakov, was sacrificed. Clytemnestra greets Achilles as her future son-in-law, and an embarrassing confusion ensues until the Old Man explains to them what Agamemnon’s true intentions are. This title reveals a world where fear is an instrument of power, but the individual survives despite the odds.A chorus of tourist women, in camp to admire the soldiers, witness their discussions and consider the fates of women in war.

In the play Even Kins Are Guilty, by Keye Abiona, a Nigerian playwright of Yoruba origin, the king is deceived into sacrificing his only daughter by his half brother, who gave a false oracular prediction that it was necessary to win his crown back from an enemy kingdom. It is possible in the Cypria Agamemnon was given four daughters, Iphigenia being distinguished from Iphianassa," Friedrich Solmsen remarks, (Solmsen 1981:353 note 1) also noting the scholium on Elektra 157. We learn that Agamemnon has sent for his daughter, Iphigeneia, telling her she will marry the Greek hero Achilles. Everything is of relevance in a political context and as it relates to the protagonist’s sense of well-being, but there are no other personalities and little real drama. The Sunday Times "Dream and reality melt together, as in Kafka, making it difficult to identify where the nightmares really begin.In Agamemnon, by the Greek poet and dramatist Aeschylus, however, Clytemnestra was made to do the killing.

This is my first Kadare book and it is not an easy read to begin with yet once the allusions to Albania pre-1985 became clearer over the first 20-30 pages I really found it riveting - helped by my exposure to Albanian society over the last 10 years and the stories told by its people about life under Enver Hoxha. Ultimately, the book argues that the ritual of sacrifice operates as a cultural mechanism for the perpetuation of patriarchal ideology not just in early Greek hexameter poetry, but throughout Greek cultural history.The myth is even directly invoked by the movie when the children's school administrator states that the daughter wrote a great essay on Iphigenia. The omission would certainly be a poignant allusion in Iliad 9 to Iphigenia’s sacrifice (and the pretext of wedding Achilles! Although citizens had lived for months in fear of the qorrfirman, the sight of its results rooted them to the ground, petrified them. It is the ancient tale of Bald Man, who one night fell into a hole, and kept falling until he reached the netherworld.