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Title: House of Names
Author: Colm Tóibín
Narrator: Juliet Stevenson, Charlie Anson, Pippa Nixon
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
Language: English
Release date: 05-09-17
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 104 votes
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
From the thrilling imagination of best-selling, 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 four 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.
Members Reviews:
Power. Control. Restraint.
Colm Toibin is a favorite novelist, and House of Names is one of his best. His legendary characters, whose names I vaguely knewAgamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Electrastruggle in ways that are both remote (the classical world) and current (the lust for power). The novel is filled with surprises, right until the end. The characters accept their world of unbearable violence with restraint and (often) quiet determination.
This novel is so well-written, I would want to listen again. The prose is spare and often moving. By the end, I felt like I knew the palace corridors, the sunken gardens and the barren landscape as if Id seen a film.
The three narrators were superb. They made judicious use of silence, giving this reader a few moments to grasp the subtlety of the characters interactions and the shock of some of the action. Overall, a superb listen.
Exquisite retelling of ancient tale
Would you listen to House of Names again? Why?
A friend who had just read it recommended it to me. I had no idea what it was about and had I known, I probably would not have purchased it.
