Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella & Stories

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He watches a May Day parade and ruminates about how through the ages tyranny has demanded the sacrifice of love and sexuality, and deformed ordinary life.

But the significance goes wider too - Suzana's father has paid with others' flesh, and his own - and has lost his own soul.

In Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, Iphigenia comes to Aulis under the belief that she is to marry Achilles. Reflecting on all this as a spectator at the May 1st Parade—one of the biggest Communist holidays—the narrator compares the father to a successor of that grand master of all sacrificers, “Comrade Agamemnon MacAtreus,” member of the Politburo. He was the son (or grandson) of Atreus, king of Mycenae, and his wife Aërope and was the brother of Menelaus.

The latter had been, apparently, sent to war by Stalin in a gesture implying that all Russians were equal; in fact, says Kadare, Stalin’s gesture had a much more sinister and cynical motivation: the sacrifice of his own son gave him free hand in demanding anyone’s life from then on. Nevertheless, one of the main reasons for the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra is his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia, the story of which is told by Euripides in his tragedies Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris.This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. In the dramatist's version, the Taurians worshipped both Artemis and Iphigenia in the Temple of Artemis at Tauris. The duo then conspire to murder the king by means of poison, allowing the half brother to assume the throne.

Through close readings of the Theogony, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and the Odyssey in conjunction with recent anthropological theory, it demonstrates how sacrifice narratives in early Greek hexameter poetry are intimately connected to a mythic-poetic discourse referred to as the “politics of the belly. Written in 1985, during the last years of the stalinist regime in Albania, together with The Shadow and A Bird Flying South, Agamemnon's Daughter was one of the three literary manuscripts Ismail Kadare managed to smuggle out of Albania just after the death of Enver Hoxha, and with the help of French editor and translator Claude Durand. The sacrifice of Iphigenia appears in the ancient Roman didactic poem De rerum natura by Lucretius as a criticism of religion.The mother begging for mercy, the disapproving second-in-command who can do nothing to stop it, the daughter who says she will do whatever it takes to help—it's all a clear echo.

This book, Agamemnon’s Daughter is actually a compilation of 3 short stories, fluently translated from a French translation of the original Albanian by David Bellos. With the campaign in trouble and the Atreidae’s reputations at stake, Agamemnon chose to sacrifice his daughter. He mourns his own lost love and considers the fate of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father before the Trojan War, and of Stalin’s son, abandoned by his father to die as a German POW.

Anticipating that his poem will seem sacrilegious, Lucretius attacks the virtue of religion by recounting the story of Iphigenia, which he considers a cruel story of a parent "making his child a sacrificial beast" on her wedding day. The narrator has fallen in love with Suzana, the beautiful daughter of a top party official (one of those touted as successor to dictator, 'The Guide', who's clearly modelled on Hoxha). In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International P