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    Cassandra at the Wedding
    Cassandra at the Wedding
    Cassandra at the Wedding
    Audiobook7 hours

    Cassandra at the Wedding

    Written by Dorothy Baker

    Narrated by Morgan Hallett

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, 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. As she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has, 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. 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 30, 2018
    ISBN9781980017264
    Cassandra at the Wedding
    Author

    Dorothy Baker

    Dorothy Baker (1907-1968) was born in Montana and grew up in California. Her first novel, Young Man with a Horn (1938), based on the life of the jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, won a Houghton Mifflin Literature Fellowship and was made into a 1950 film starring Lauren Bacall, Doris Day and Kirk Douglas. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942, Baker wrote three other novels: Trio (1943), Our Gifted Son (1948) and Cassandra at the Wedding (1962).

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    Reviews for Cassandra at the Wedding

    4/5

    177 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The main narrator- student Cassie - is driving home to the wedding o her identical twin sister.From the first paragraph, the reader realises there's something a little odd about Cassie.As the tale progresses, a whole host of issues are revealed or hinted at - a recently deceased mother, who had issues of her own; Cassie's need to remain with her twin- even as cracks have developed in their relationship; mental illness, anorexia; an unsuccessful lesbian affair.This is class writing. I can't say I enjoyed it- it felt like spending a day in a psychiatric unit with a very demanding patient. But highly accomplished.
    • 4/5
      Really loved this book. Fun to read a good book set in my particular region of the sticks.
    • 5/5
      A small gem, timelessly and beautifully written. Portrait of a hopeless, infuriating, coruscating young person on the cusp of some kind of maturity, but wanting messy drama, set off by her rather different twin sister whose wedding she intends to ruin. An overlooked classic.
    • 5/5
      This has been one of my favorite books since I first read it almost 20 years ago. On rereading it I had to get past a first time sensation of enjoying the book so much I couldn't properly read it. A similar thing happened the first time I read it. Cassandra Edwards is a wonderful creation. I could not believe how closely I identified with her; I a 50 something straight male - she a young mentally disturbed lesbian twin. I think her inability to prevent herself from saying what she knows will cause pain despite her knowledge that she should not. I could not help remembering my father's oft repeated bromide that Truth was an over-rated value. This reckless inability is evident in her behavior as well. Baker is a marvelous writer whose books are too little known. Young Man with a Horn is also very good although not quite the same league as Cassandra. It seems to have escaped obscurity dure to its connection to the inferior Kirk Douglas movie adaptation. Her other novels are very hard to get a hold of, but I can't imagine that they are not worthwhile
    • 5/5
      I came across the idea of reading this book because it was all over bookish Twitter last month and then I saw that the hosts of the Backlisted podcast had selected it as their featured book a couple of weeks ago. And it is a gem.When the novel opens, eponymous Cassandra is on her way home from Berkeley where she is working on her thesis, to her father's ranch in Northern California for her twin sister Judith's wedding. It's the early 1960s and these twins have grown up thinking they only need each other and Cassandra still feels that way. But she now knows that Judith probably doesn't otherwise why would she be getting married and planning to live across the country in NY?They used to share an apartment at Berkeley but earlier that year she had moved to NY. And Cassandra is miffed. But she has other problems that are slowly revealed over the short novel's pages but it pretty much all boils down to the relationship between these two sisters.The writing is stunning. The cast of characters, although quite short, is brilliant: drunken, arrogant father; meek, aim to please grandmother; future perfect husband Jake and the twins, Judith, a brilliant pianist and Cassandra, a brilliant writer if she can allow herself to be because lurking in the background throughout the novel is Jane, the twin's mother for whom they are still grieving after her death a few years prior. I loved it. But listening to the Backlisted podcast after I read the book added another whole dimension to the appreciation of this book. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing a lot of that in the future.
    • 4/5
      The story of two identical twins Cassandra and Judith brought up in a wealthy professional family who face separation when the younger twin (Judith: a matter of minutes) plans to get married. The time scale of the novel is a momentous three days in the lives of the two girls as they try and work through the difficulties of not being together or as Cassandra says no longer being as one. The title of the book has led to a soundbite on the front cover describing it as "A dark comedy about marriage' which is wrong on both counts; it is not a comedy and it's not about marriage.The novel was published in 1962 and was the last of the four novels Dorothy Baker wrote. I recently read her first novel [Young Man with a Horn] and was so impressed by Baker's handling of dialogue that I wanted to read this novel which is said to be her best. Dorothy Baker's husband claimed that the novel was based on their own two daughters and certainly the dialogue between the two crackles with an intensity that feels like it could have actually taken place. Like her first novel there is hardly a word out of place. The first part of the novel is from the POV of Cassandra. She is travelling from Berkley California to her parents ranch some 5 hours away. She wants to see her sister who has returned home to prepare for her wedding. We learn that the sisters had set up house together in Berkley but nine months ago Judith had left and had now met a man she wants to marry. Cassandra had only been alone for three weeks before seeking help from psychiatry. Now on her journey home the anxiety that she feels is expressed by her first telephone call to her parents home where it is revealed she is travelling one day earlier than planned to see her sister before the wedding. She finally gets to speak to Judith and her knees "buckle with recognition" when she hears her sisters voice. For the majority of the novel we hear Cassandra's side of the story, her view of the close relationship with her sister and their relationship with their father and Granny who still lives at home. A smaller chunk of the novel is from Judith's point of view before we are back with Cassie.Baker is able to pinpoint in some detail the sisters' state of mind through their actions and conversations. Because much of the novel is from Cassie's POV she is seen as a sort of victim, the one who will lose most from Judith's marriage. The family unit is a little reclusive living out on the ranch and their father is a professor who has sought solace in brandy after the early death of his wife. The two sisters like him are very intelligent, but this does not help them solve their emotional issues, nobody behaves badly, but extricating themselves from the emotional trauma of their separation proves to be impossible without hurting the more vulnerable Cassie.The micro world of this novel is not going to shed any light on the human condition, but it does focus extremely well on a vary small incident within it. From the first few pages the quality of the writing hooked me into Cassie and the families' issues, but as the story unfolded I thought the novel lost a little of its intensity. However a very good read and so 4 stars.
    • 3/5
      A beautifully written, albeit oblique novel about Judith and Cassandra - twins who are living apart for the first time in their lives. Cassandra is having a harder time of it and considers herself abandoned by her sister. When she gets to the ranch for the wedding, she has unformed ideas about breaking it up by talking sense to Jude. Those don’t quite gel and instead there is a lot of drinking, frequent really strange conversations, an attempted suicide and eventually, the wedding. I think I’m going to have to read this several times before everything comes clear. If it does.
    • 4/5
      Quirky, nervy little book with wonderful characterizations. Made me think of Chekhov a bit, those slightly fraught, flawed characters and the way your sympathy for them sneaks up on you. Cassandra is a lovely character. Well, they all are, even if Judith is a bit bland—but she's supposed to be, so it's OK. And you end up sympathizing with her for just having had to grow up in the shadow of her sister's wacky brilliance.The Aristophanes connection is accurate, but it's also kind of simplistic—the book is about a lot more than just the rending of the one from the one true love. There's a whole lot about family—how it gets pulled apart, the traps parents set for their children (that whole "we don't need other people" ethos they grew up with), young people trying to pull away and find their own identities in the face of such an overbearing family unit. I got a very strong feeling of someone in middle age musing about what it is to be young, that period of time before your sense of your own self has settled in. Baker would have been what, in her 50s when she wrote this? It's definitely a mature gaze on events, even though the story is told in Cassandra's voice.
    • 4/5
      Cassandra Edwards is a French literature graduate student at Berkeley, who returns to her childhood home for her twin sister’s wedding. She loves her sister Judth fiercely, and although she’s never met her fiancée, Cassandra is determined to stop the wedding from happening.This is a very difficult novel to explain, because although short, and taking place over the course of a couple of days, there’s a lot going on. Cassandra is one of the oddest people I’ve run into in literature in a long time; although the book is told mostly in the first person from her point of view, I’ve never seen a character who is less self-aware. There are also a number of contradictions to Cassandra’s personality, which makes her an intriguing character. For example, if she loves her sister so much, then why is she hell-bent on ruining her happiness? Judging from what happens on the day of the wedding, it’s clear that Cassandra is an incredibly selfish person too, which should make it easy for the reader to dislike her; instead, I get a feeling of pathos when I read Cassandra’s side of the story. The novel is also told from the point of view of Judith, who is a far less interesting character, but she has a number of insights into Cassandra’s character that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. As I’ve said before, Cassandra is incredible unself-aware; it’s amazing how the author can tell us things about Cassandra that she isn’t aware of herself. I won’t get into details for fear of spoiling things, but there’s a major bombshell about Cassandra that’s revealed towards the end that I thought was really well done (although this book was written in the ‘60s, so it’s not explicitly said).The family itself is also very interesting—besides Judith there’s their father, a perpetually drunk philosophy professor; the grandmother; and Judith’s fiancée, the ideal Jack Finch. Also present, but not physically, is the twins’ mother, who has died a couple of years before this novel takes place. If you’re expecting lots of plot, there isn’t much, so part of the strength of this book lies in the characters and how dysfunctional they all seem sometimes.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this very-California, mid-20th-century novel of manners, if there is such a thing. Cassandra, a doctoral student at Berkeley and an identical twin, opens the book on the way home to the family ranch Northern California for her sister Judith's wedding. Judith, a classical pianist, is about to marry a young doctor she met in New York in a small family wedding, unless Cassandra can convince her otherwise. This is a tale of an eccentric family -- a philosophizing, early retired father who thrives on brandy; a conventional and sweet, if ineffectual, grandmother; a successful novelist and screenwriter mother, whose presence remains in the house although she has died, and the twin sisters with highly refined tastes and imaginations, as Cassandra insists:"Take it on faith -- we're special.... Who else could have had our mother for a mother and our father for a father? Who else do you know that drives a Riley and owns a Boesendorfer, or even knows what they are. We didn't join Job's Daughters, or go steady with some clod, or live with the Alpha Kappa Thetas, because we never spoke that language or thought in those terms. How could we? We can start living where others imaginations fail."In clumsier hands, this story could be excruciating, but Baker's touch is light, skillful and amusing. She's not writing about a dysfunctional family, but one rather defined by its quirks and possibilities, as is Cassandra herself.
    • 4/5
      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
    • 5/5
      Cassandra is a graduate student at Berkeley, unhappy and increasingly disconnected from her life. She does try and create relationships with the people around her, but her very high standards and horror of being misunderstood mean that the only person she has ever really felt at ease with is her twin sister, Judith. However, Judith moves to New York, and nine months later tells her sister that she is getting married. The book opens a few days before the wedding, as Cassandra, convinced Judith is making a terrible mistake, prepares herself to drive home for the ceremony. This is a wonderfully written story. Cassandra narrates most of the book, and her voice is remarkable. She mostly avoids looking head-on at her problems, and yet her desperation and sometimes delusion are clear. When Judith took a turn narrating, I was a bit scared - I felt like I already understood the situation, from both sides of the story, and I didn't really want a simplified version from Judith. I needn't have worried, though: in fact, Judith's narration managed to add an extra level of complexity. Recommended for: anyone who likes literary fiction.