Trojan Tales - Richard Seltzer

These stories, selected from three novels, show events of the Trojan War reflected through the minds of participants who are immersed in the immediacy of the moment.

Because we're blessed with the gift of not knowing the future, life isn't just what happens. It's enriched by the cloud of possibilities, what might happen, what we expect and hope for. This novel is a showing rather than a telling of the stories of Troy, restoring the immediacy of the moment as experienced by Cassandra, Helen, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Polyxena, Andromache, and Hecuba.

Your familiarity with the traditional stories will prompt you to anticipate, only to be surprised by depths of personality and motivation, consistent with the original, but unexpected. And you'll savor the ironic differences between what you know as a reader and what the characters know.

Rather than tediously proceed from one event to the next, you leap ahead from one dramatic moment to the next. The action takes place in dialogue and inner dialogue (thoughts in the making) rather than narration/exposition.

A standard synopsis/plot summary would miss the point of the book.

The story unfolds as traditionally known, but the personalities and motivations of the main characters are often surprising.

For example:

Helen and Paris don't go to Troy and no one knows where they are until after the war has gone on for more than nine years. When she shows up, she had close-cropped hair and a jagged scar across her cheek (from an encounter with pirates.

Achilles is a cross-dresser. He has a romance with Polyxena, daughter of the king of Troy, who has the look and the training of an Amazon and can out-wrestle her.

Clytemnestra's handmaid is her lover Aegisthus in disguise. Her children are his, not her husband Agamemnon's.