Blog Nº 52
“So go, girl. We should have been one person all along, not two.”
I thoroughly enjoyed Cassandra at the Wedding, getting through it in a couple of days as I was so enthralled by the impossible, brilliant protagonist Cassandra Edwards. Baker has produced what the blurb describes as an ‘entrancing tragicomic novella’ and I can only agree with this conclusion.
Our heroine Cassandra is a graduate student at Berkeley, who is on her way home to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend her identical twin Judith’s wedding to a young doctor from Connecticut. However, Cassandra – at once brilliant, frenzied, nerve-wracked and miserable – is determined to do whatever it takes to ruin the wedding and ‘save’ her sister. It is impossible to predict the course of action which Cassandra at the Wedding takes; besides the plan to sabotage, Cassandra must also grapple with her complex feelings towards her family. Namely Judith who Cassandra believes should be her alter-ego, plus her whiskey-soaked father, her dead mother and her kindly grandmother. This book is a story of self-discovery, family relationships and facing your feelings.
There is something about characters named Cassandra; though the Cassandra in this novel is more emotionally unstable, she is as vibrant and interesting to read as the Cassandra of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Both are frank, open and highly captivating. Throughout the course of Cassandra at the Wedding, we witness Cassandra variously as heartbroken, pitiful, conniving, unsure, self-aware, absurd, intelligent – yet always impossibly sympathetic and at times highly amusing. Despite the book being published just over 60 years ago, Cassandra is enduringly modern, insightful and relatable to twentysomethings today. Baker clearly has an adept understanding of the complexities of the heart and soul, and I was very sad to say goodbye to Cassandra as I reluctantly finished the novel.
An enduring theme of Cassandra at the Wedding is sisterhood, which is particularly strong in this instance because Cassandra and Judith are identical twins. For Cassandra, it is difficult to accept the fact that Judith decided to go to a different college and there met a man she wants to marry, who will thus become extremely important in her life. It is quite clear that Cassandra is in some ways enveloped in a childlike fantasy of the sisters always remaining inseparable and Judith remaining under her influence; this indicates why she feels compelled to sabotage the wedding and ‘save’ her sister from a situation that Cassandra cannot believe she would want to be in. Yet at the same time, Cassandra is desperate to establish herself as an independent person from her sister, creating an interesting paradox. It is significant that for a small section of the novel, Baker switches the narrator from Cassandra to Judith so we hear her perspective first-hand, understanding them both as individuals but also witnessing the unknowable bond shared between twins.
I would highly recommend Cassandra at the Wedding for anyone seeking a read full of freshness, emotion, plot twists and vigor. For me, it will become one of those books that I wish I could read again for the first time!
Happy reading,
Imo x
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