Name: shen's review of Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
Item: Cassandra at the Wedding
Rating: 4.5
Author: shen

Dorothy Baker

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.   Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has.   First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.  

Cassandra at the Wedding

shen

“Ask me if I can ever be serious, and the only answer is that it’s all I can be and all I ever am, have been, or will be. It’s my whole trouble, but it’s also my one certainty—to know how serious I can be about what I love.” / “[...] it’s a question of working ceaselessly at being as different as possible because there must be a gap before it can be bridged. And the bridge is the real project.”

a succinct picture of separation, of coming to terms with how much of your life can be found in another’s, and where they can take it without you. written in such a charming voice; places identity so closely with one’s reflection and expression. darling work

“Ask me if I can ever be serious, and the only answer is that it’s all I can be and all I ever am, have been, or will be. It’s my whole trouble, but it’s also my one certainty—to know how serious I can be about what I love.” / “[...] it’s a question of working ceaselessly at being as different as possible because there must be a gap before it can be bridged. And the bridge is the real project.”

a succinct picture of separation, of coming to terms with how much of your life can be found in another’s, and where they can take it without you. written in such a charming voice; places identity so closely with one’s reflection and expression. darling work

Clay Carey

lucy rosenthal

- this is the best novel i have read in years and maybe ever

- this is franny and zooey told in reverse

- this is franny and zooey for when the girlies get into their mid-twenties

- she’s just like me forreal (i will not say which one)

Donald

Reading this book, I couldn't help but think of 'Catcher in the Rye', which I hated, and how much better this is. Now, 'Cassandra at the Wedding' is not very similar to 'Catcher in the Rye', but they share enough similarities for my mind to be stuck on the comparison.

The other comparison I made was with the documentary 'The Bridge', which captures and explores people killing themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Anyway, I highly recommend this book. I can only imagine how exciting it would have been to read it in the early 60's when it was first published, and I wonder, now, if anyone has bothered to add it to the canon of LGBT fiction, where it belongs.

shen &
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

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