House of Names

House of Names is a novel by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, following Brooklyn and The Master, and retells the famous tragedy of Agamemnon's family in the manner of a modern novel. The book opens with the Mycenaean queen Clytemnestra speaking in her own voice: during the years Agamemnon led the Greek alliance to Troy, she had long been familiar with "the smell of death." Three years earlier, to secure the gods' blessing for the expedition, Agamemnon lured his eldest daughter Iphigenia to the camp under the pretext of arranging her wedding and killed her as a sacrifice; Clytemnestra can never forgive this, and turns Aegisthus, held in the dungeon, into her lover and accomplice, striking back in revenge when Agamemnon returns in triumph. The novel alternates between the voices of Clytemnestra, her son Orestes, and her daughter Electra, retelling Agamemnon's death, Iphigenia's sacrifice, and Orestes's exile and return, restoring figures with blurred outlines in myth to concrete individuals with desires, fears, and pain. With restrained and sensitive psychological realism, Tóibín writes violence as a cycle repeated across generations, and asks whether that cycle can end. The novel draws mainly on Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy and the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides; Tóibín has also spoken of how the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland prompted him to rethink the connection between ancient myth and reality.