Kassandra tells the tale of the fall of Troy in a first-person flashback narrated by Cassandra herself. At the time of the telling, she has been in Greek captivity and is on her way to her execution. Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, the king of Troy, and his wife Hecube. Long before this novel’s starting point, the god Apollo had given Cassandra the gift of prophecy, but because she the refused to give him sexual favors he cursed her that her prophecies would never be believed. Cassandra’s lengthy monologue — the book is not divided into chapters, nor are there any line breaks between gaps in the story — begins some years before the Trojan War and continues past the city’s fall.

Wolf also expects her readers to know the court of Troy as well as Cassandra, who has grown up in it. She gives a little bit of context about who is who, and eventually I was able to piece together most of the relationships, but I am sure that as a person who has only read one Iliad one time I missed things. I added a layer of difficulty for myself by reading Kassandra in German, so I had to make the leap across the different transliterations of Greek names that have become traditional in German and English. (As I note below, there is an English translation of Kassandra, and Wolf’s use of language is not so spectacular that it presents more than the usual challenges of translation.)

Crucially for readers like me, who only know the Trojan War through the Iliad, Cassandra tells of expeditions from Troy to reclaim the king’s sister from captivity in Sparta, where she had been taken after another war. Women have considerable agency in the ancient world that Wolf depicts, but it is also, in the end, sharply limited, and women are routinely treated as objects, prizes for male conquest, or as a means to hurt other men. After two failed expeditions to retrieve their king’s sister, the Trojans’ willingness to support taking an equally valuable prize — Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta — is more understandable. In Wolf’s telling, Paris breaks the customs of hospitality by insulting Menelaus when the latter is on a pilgrimage to Troy, and his subsequent abduction of Helen guarantees that the war will be unrelenting.

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