Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Paperback, 2002

Status

Available

Collection

Publication

New York : Picador, c2002.

Description

Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents' desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.

Media reviews

Guardian
This novel repeats the stand-out achievements...an ability to describe the horrible in a comic voice, an unusual form of narration and an eye for bizarre detail.
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Eugenides does such a superb job of capturing the ironies and trade-offs of assimilation that Calliope's evolution into Cal doesn't feel sudden at all, but more like a transformation we've been through ourselves.
The New York Times Book Review
His narrator is a soul who inhabits a liminal realm, a creature able to bridge the divisions that plague humanity, endowed with ''the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both.'' That utopian reach makes ''Middlesex''
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deliriously American; the novel's patron saint is Walt Whitman, and it has some of the shagginess of that poet's verse to go along with the exuberance. But mostly it is a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination and of love.
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''Middlesex'' is a novel about roots and rootlessness. (The middle-sex, middle-ethnic, middle-American DNA twists are what move Cal to Berlin; the author now lives there too.) But the writing itself is also about mixing things up, grafting flights of descriptive fancy with hunks of conversational
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dialogue, pausing briefly to sketch passing characters or explain a bit of a bygone world. ''The Virgin Suicides'' is all of a piece, contained within the boundaries of one neighborhood; ''Middlesex'' -- a strange Scheherazade of a book -- is all in pieces, as all big family stories are, bursting the boundaries of logic.
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The New York Times
Like the Greek drama cuff links that Cal's father wears, ''Middlesex'' has two faces -- one comedic, the other tragic -- and the novel turns the story of Cal's coming of age into an uproarious epic, at once funny and sad, about misplaced identities and family secrets.
Library Journal
The author of The Virgin Suicides is known for his daring, so it's hardly surprising that 'Middlesex' refers not to a town but a state of being: Calliope, a student at an exclusive girls school during the 1970s, discovers that she is a hermaphrodite.
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Funny, humane, endearingly self-aware, Cal takes the book's most potentially alienating feature – it's told by a boy with a vestigial penis who's mistaken for a girl for the first 14 years of his life – and turns it to improbable, wonderful advantage. Here's a novel that emphatically declines
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to state whether it's a guy book or a chick book. Instead, it's the most reliably American story there is: A son of immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak … [Eugenides’] rarer power resides in the ability to craft scenes whose freshness of incident matches their freshness of description.
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dagensbok.com
Sammantaget hjälper detta Eugenides att hålla rytmen och farten uppe men det ger istället en utspridd historia med periodvis dålig väghållning.

User reviews

LibraryThing member chlorine
It had been a long time since I was that much into a book.

Cal, born Callipe, tells his story: he seemed to be a girl when he was born, and was raised as such, then turned out at puberty to be a man whose sexual organs did not develop normally.
One of the main characteristic of this book is that the
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narrator takes his time with this story: instead of telling only the facts linked with his condition, he begins by telling the events which led to his conception, then goes back to tell about his grand-parents (he has a hereditary recessive genetic anomaly, and therefore he unwinds the story of his family, and the same-family marriages that happened), then comes back to his birth, and throughout the book he strolls in this way in the family history. This narrative style made me think about Love in the time of cholera: you wait for a specific event, but in the end something else is told before it, but it is not frustrating and you are able to enjoy the ride even if you don't quite know where it's leading and when you'll get there.

The other thing I really liked is that a lot of details are given about Cal's life and his family's. This places him in a normal context, and in the end places a strong stress on the fact that he is a normal human being rather than on what makes him different, even if his particular nature of course plays a big role in the story.

All in all, this is a very well written and captivating book, which succeeds in being moving without being excessively emotive.
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LibraryThing member porch_reader
This Pulitzer-prize-winning book is narrated by Calliope Stephanides, who is later known as Cal. She begins:

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August
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of 1974."

At 41, Cal is a narrator with the perspective needed to share an epic story, beginning with his grandparents who came from Greece to Detroit, Michigan, with a closely-guarded secret. The first half of the book is their story, the story of their son Milton and his wife Tessie, and the story of the immigrant experience in Detroit. It is both sweeping and personal, as any epic story should be. But it is when Calliope is born, joining her older brother (referred to only as Chapter Eleven), that the story becomes intimate, pulling us into the identity struggles that Calliope must negotiate throughout her childhood and adolescence.

I loved this book. It has the feel of some of John Irving's best novels - sweeping, yet intimate (and as a huge Irving fan, that is high praise from me). Calliope is an interesting narrator. Although she tells the story with the perspective of an adult, she is able to bring us into her adolescent mind as she deals with issues of growing up that are at once, similar to those of all great coming-of-age stories, yet completely unique to her experience. She brings us into a family that is loving and warm, but flawed. Their stories are quirky, filled with unusual circumstances, yet wholly believable.

The two halves of this book - before and after Calliope's birth - are not entirely cohesive. She tells the story of her grandparents and parents with some distance. It is a story with details that are specific to them, but with themes that underlie the experiences of many. Calliope's story, on the other hand, is less common, harder to identify with on the surface. This makes it all the more surprising that Eugenides can bring the reader to empathize with this part of the story as much as with the first, more universal part. After escaping from busy daily life into the hands of an experienced storyteller every night for the last week or so, I was sorry to see this book end.
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LibraryThing member MuseofIre
I of course had heard a lot of buzz about this book when it came out a few years ago, but I didn't really pay attention. I have a lingering prejudice against so-called "literary" fiction, born out of my experiences in the 1970s, when Donald Barthelme and his character-is-all school seemed to have
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banished plot entirely. (I know it's not all like that now; that's why it's a prejudice.) Anyway, that means I never register what's up for the Pulitzer, the Booker, the Whatever, because it always seems unlikely that those books will ever hold any interest for me.

I might never have changed my mind about Middlesex if it hadn't been recommended by Abigail Nussbaum at Asking the Wrong Questions. Even with her brief review, and even knowing that the title referred to a boy raised as a girl and not the county in England, I didn't know what to expect. I vaguely guessed it was something very British, with tea and nannies. I could not have been more wrong, and was completely blown away.

Set mostly in Detroit in the '60s and '70s, Middlesex ranges fluidly backward to Turkey in the '20s to Berlin in the present to tell the story of Calliope Helen Stephanides, a biological male raised and treated as a female. With riffs on genetics, history, politics, growing up ethnic in a WASPy world, family, race, the suburbs, and Cadillacs, this is a funny, tragic, eloquent book, with many memorable passages and images.

Part of the fun for me is that Cal is almost exactly my own age. He experienced many of the things I experienced growing up. Like me, he lived through the race riots of the '60s (way more up close and personal than I did, however); his teenage medicine cabinet is filled with Psst instant shampoo and Love deodorant; schoolgirls use Flair pens. (The minorest of quibbles: noone drank bottled water in 1973.) One thing he doesn't really talk about much is Callie's clothes. Did Callie the girl, like me and so many girls our age, fight with her mother about wearing jeans instead of skirts? Would she have experienced them as liberation or as another threat to her precarious gender identity, as with her refusal to cut her hair?

Another gripping, not so fun, aspect of the book is Callie's eventual diagnosis as a hermaphrodite. I think a lot of people can identify with Cal's horror at the realization that, beyond the normal insecurities of adolescence, there really is something different about him. And that what's more, his parents, who supposedly know him the best and love him the most, think he is fundamentally flawed, wrong, broken, in need of fixing. For me, this resonated very deeply with my experience of growing up fat.

In some ways, the book reminded me strongly of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose in the way Cal reconstructs the lives of his grandparents in an effort to understand and cope with his own situation. Like Lyman Ward, Cal must fully accept his own difference before he can let others in and accept love. I only wish this part of the story -- Cal's final achievement of intimacy with a woman after 30 years of loneliness -- had been more deeply explored.

Edited to add: I may have been late on the Middlesex bandwagon, but at least I beat Oprah!
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LibraryThing member msbaba
Middlesex by Jefferey Eugenides is as unique as its protagonist, Cal/Calliope Stephanides, a hermaphrodite born a female, yet destined at puberty to express his underlying male nature.

It is easy to see why this book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003. At once a sweeping rollicking comic
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epic family saga, this novel breaks new ground by successfully hybridizing different literary styles and throwing aside conventions of proper storytelling voice and construction. The novel is told primarily in first person. How else could Eugenides tell the tale of this endearing heroine/hero without resorting to awkward use of pronouns? But then comes the real breakthrough. How does the author take us into the minds of the supporting characters when the novel is narrated in first person? Eugenides solves this by making his narrator creatively omniscient. The reader is consciously aware at all times that it is Cal/Callie, the protagonist, that is stepping into the minds of his/her ancestors and immediate family to reveal their hidden feelings as she/he tells their tales in third person. It works! The storytelling comes alive on two levels: we better understand the motivations of the third-person characters, and we learn to treasure our creative, endearing, fully human storytelling protagonist. As a bonus, this construction often leaves the door wide open for outrageous comedy, and Eugenides makes full use of it.

The book mixes literary styles, too. It starts out almost like a fairy tale—a tragicomic Greek epic—with chorus, no less! Much of the next part of the novel is written in a 19th-century style. Finally, the novel transforms into a modern psychological coming-of-age tale. As the literary style transforms over the course of the novel, we progress from the stories of Cal/Callie’s Greek ancestors through to the present day. Along the way, we are treated to a courageous Greek-American immigrant family saga as well as the story of Detroit from the Prohibition through to the present day. The story of Detroit is so vividly told that the city almost becomes a third character. In particular, we are brought into the alien worlds of early Ford assembly-line factory work, bootlegging prohibition gin-running and speakeasies, the birth of the Nation of Islam, the 1967 race riots, the rise of franchising wealth, and white flight to rich suburbs including sending children to private schools to avoid racial desegregation. All is so vividly recreated that the reader is transported.

At the heart of the novel is, of course, poor confused sweet child Callie/Cal. The story of her/his gradual awakening to sexual awareness, self-acceptance, and identity is profoundly touching, tastfully rendered, and ultimately very believable.

I loved this book. I did not want it to end; even after almost 600 pages, I wanted more.
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LibraryThing member lit_chick
Despite the Pulitzer and eons of wonderful reviews and recommendations, I found Middlesex to be a complete miss. I was drawn to the story of Callie/Calliope's hermaphroditism, but after two hundred pages, I was still waiting (impatiently, by now) for the birth of the protagonist. The much too long
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family history of the incestuous Stephanides and their escape to Prohibition-era Detroit did not interest me. Nor did I find the characters relatable or appealing. Middlesex failed to deliver; hard as I still find it to do, I abandoned the novel at two hundred.
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LibraryThing member SqueakyChu
I have mixed feelings about this book. The opening line of the story grabbed me as very interesting and led me to believe this was going to be a story about a hermaphrodite. I love stories that delve into human psychology. I then found myself ploughing through hundreds of pages to be able to read
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about the character who flamed my intial interest in the book. I had to go through the stories of the main character’s grandparents and parents before, 300 pages later, I finally got to the part which enabled me to start reading about the main character. I hate family sagas. Had I known this would be the case, I would have opted out of reading this book. As it stood, I finished the book because the writing was excellent (and Pulitzer Prize winning), and I still wanted to learn the story of Calliope the hermaphrodite. I finally did get to the part of the story that was engaging...but the wait was way too long.
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LibraryThing member mrstreme
I know I am in the minority here, but Middlesex was a huge disappointment for me. We all know the plot - that it's a story about a Greek girl who later discovers that she's actually a boy. The premise is excellent, but the book falls short in so many ways.

Eugenides is a wonderful writer, and he
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does an excellent job telling a story - too bad it's not the story of Callie but of her grandparents and parents too. You reach the middle of this 500+ page book before Callie is even conceived. However, Callie narrates the whole thing. How would she know such details about her grandparents and parents? She can't - and I think it's a major flaw in the book (not to mention that you have to wait until the middle of the book for Callie to be introduced as a character. Oh sorry, did I say that already? Well, it's worth repeating because it's a major flaw too).

Because half of the book is dedicated to Callie's lineage, I feel his/her character lacks development, which is a huge shame. For me, Callie had the potential to be one of the most interesting characters in modern American literature. Instead, the character falls flat - just like the entire novel.

Middlesex is a Pulitzer prize winner and a recent selection for the Oprah Book Club. Obviously, many people enjoyed this novel. I am sorry that I am not one of them. However, I am more sorry that I wasted a week of my life finishing a book that I now call Middlesucks.
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LibraryThing member seph
I picked up this book when I was looking to branch out of my favorite genres and the Pulitzer caught my eye. I figured it had to be interesting once I learned it was about a hermaphrodite, but I really found myself immersed in the story of Cal's family and their experiences as immigrants to the
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U.S. Reading about Cal's Greek family had me thinking about my own family, Polish on my dad's side and Irish on my mom's. The fact that Cal's family settled in Detroit and I was able to recognize most of the locations, which are given enough loving attention to qualify as characters themselves, also brought me all that much further into the story.

It's a beautifully written book, with words used as skillfully as grapes in a master vinter's care, the result being a warming, richly flavored, intoxicating read. I laughed out loud, cried once in a while, and gasped in shock more than a couple times.

I thought the story ended a bit abruptly and almost anti-climatically, but if it had ended with any more drama, it most likely would've felt contrived.

This excellent read is well worthy of The Pulitzer, and if I normally read this kind of realism, I would give it five stars, but because I'm ranking it here for my own purposes among books in my preferred genres of impossible worlds and fantastic tales I must rank it lower. Don't get me wrong though, this book is top notch and will not disappoint, especially if you prefer richly spun stories that take place in our own familiar world.
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LibraryThing member Eat_Read_Knit
I picked this book up in a charity shop for 50p. Had it been priced higher I probably wouldn't have bothered: although I'd had recommendations to read it, and despite its regular appearance on any number of 'books everyone should read' lists, I was fairly sure I wouldn't like it. And having bought
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it, I was pretty sure it would take me a long time to plough through it.

I was wrong on both counts. I loved this book, and I neglected all sorts of important tasks while I devoured it in less than 48 hours.

Right from this stark and startling opening sentence, this remarkable book surprises and moves the reader. It is the story of Greek-American Cal Stephanides, and of his family and genetic heritage and the circumstances which mean that he spends his early years as a little girl.

It is an immensely powerful story, thought-provoking and it is beautifully told. I rather wished that we'd heard a little more of how Callie/Cal the subject became Cal the narrator, but on the other hand there is something very satisfying about the way that the book ends with a new beginning.

The various strands of the story are interwoven in a way which engages interest and moves the narrative along in a lively manner. The historical and regional detail and atmosphere are beautiful, and the characters are very believable and human.

Very strongly recommended.
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LibraryThing member SheilaDeeth
“I was born twice…” this book begins. What an intriguing start. And the story lives up to the promise of those words. The past of a young man’s grandparents makes a curious historical love story, taking the reader from the burning of Smyrna to the burning of a Detroit suburb, with odd
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detours through the beginnings of radical Islam and the American dream. I loved the quiet mystery of the main character, the challenge of unknown identity that slowly changes to known but strange. And I loved the challenge to the reader’s preconceptions in the writing. How would we react? And what right would we have to complain? Cal, or Calliope, is Greek and American, man and woman, but above all human, and this delightfully human tale paints a picture of him that sings.
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LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C
I loved this novel. I picked up this fat tome with some trepidation, hearing it was inspired by a memoir discovered and promoted by Foucault by and about a hermaphrodite. I pictured some post-modern turgid avant-garde mess--like Delillo's Underworld, which had been on the same recommendation list.
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Instead I found what was promised in Underworld's blurbs was fulfilled in Middlesex--a Great American Novel--and a page-turner.

Strangely, in the tale of a hermaphrodite I didn't find anything remotely freakish, but humanely universal, as if by having this protagonist of an ambiguous gender, Eugenides was able to embrace and bridge both (all?) genders. It's an ambitious work, taking in about 80 years from his Greek immigrant grandparents roots in Turkey, to his parents and childhood in Detroit, to his coming of age on the road from New York City to San Francisco and his current life at a diplomatic posting in Germany. It takes in massacres in Turkey, Ellis Island, the development of America's car culture, Prohibition with it's Speakeasies and bootlegging, The Great Depression, World War II, The Nation of Islam, Detroit race riots and Black/White relations, the sexual revolution, politics, religion--there doesn't seem anything missed, and yet nothing that feels rambling or contrived or caricatured.

The voice is miraculous. Technically it's a first person narrative, but it breaks the bonds of that point of view into an expansive omniscience in telling its story of three generations: Book One dealing with his grandparents in Turkey and their immigration to Detroit; Book Two with the story of his grandparents and parents in Detroit before his birth; Book Three with his childhood and early adolescence; Book Four with his crisis of identity when doctors discover he's not the girl he was raised to be. Even in those two parts of the book during his own lifetime, the narration has that expansive, feel of third person omniscience, but with the intimacy of the first person voice.

Eugenides makes me feel for his characters. I ached for Callie--and Cal--both. I worried for him. I hoped for him. I was propelled through the 500 pages not wanting to skip one paragraph and ended it sorry it was over and wanting to read this again sometime--and Eugenides other novel.
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LibraryThing member Snakeshands
There's something particularly sharp about the way Eugenides picks out the full drama and context of going through the 20th Century American Experience. Looking back after reading this, he did it with Virgin Suicides too, except it was zoomed in on the white-flight suburban moment of the 50s.That
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said, this book is big and sprawling and hilarious and so gripping that I just read the last 300 pages in a single sitting far, far into the night where I really shouldn't still be awake. Sure it's about sexual identity and all the hangups and burning lusts and confusions we have even without having to figure out basic questions of our genitalia. But it's also about immigration, about assimilation, about the history of Detroit and of Greek-Americans, and it's got so much life whirling around it that it easily matches all those vibrant-immigrant-Brooklyn/Manhattan novels that got written in the 50s and 60s. If anything, it's a lot like Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, but zeroed in on a particular genre more and with the laser-sharp sense of story arc and structure that this focus gives you. That is to say, even with the extra focus, it's still this profusion of very, very American experiences and characters and plot events, everything from Henry Ford to bootleggers to Nixon.But Eugenides is just full of talent, and full of HEART (in this book more than his last) enough to make you care deeply for his characters, catch your breath at his plot twists and environments, and giggle wildly at the occasional bit of real absurdity. A great book, and I hope the next one is anywhere near this good.
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LibraryThing member Foxen
This is a reread of one of my favorite books. The protagonist has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, a genetic mutation where the effect is a type of hermaphroditism such that he appears female until puberty, when he essentially switches to becoming male. The story follows the protagonist's
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understanding of himself and of gender in general. He starts with his grandparents, who emigrated from Turkey and set the genetic stage by marrying even though they were brother and sister. It follows through his parents and then his own life, sexuality, and self-discovery, and is interwoven throughout with mythology (he's Greek, so there's a lot of classicism incorporated) and the transformations that society is going through as he is growing up (and transforming himself) (the family settles in Detroit, and there's lots of discussion of race and the dynamics of immigrant and racial populations, as well as a great scene in the Detroit riots).

The writing in this book is excellent. Eugenides has a very fluid style full of subtle allusions and echoes of Greek poets. All of the science and gender research in it is very correct, too. The protagonist's interactions with a particular gender researcher are modeled on an actual case in the gender literature - gender researchers always get very excited when a case shows up that sheds light on the nature vs. nurture debate: the protagonist here (and the real person he's based on) was one such case, being genetically male, but raised as female until puberty. In the famous case the researcher, named John Money if you're interested, believed that the subject proved that nurture (the gender of raising) was the determining factor, claiming that the subject was completely female. Over time, though, the story unraveled and it turned out that aspects of the subject had been concealed, and the subject eventually switched their gender identity to living as a man. The fictionalized version in Middlesex does a very good job exploring all the factors going into this, and is accurate to the real story, as far as I know it.

To summarize, then, Middlesex is a wonderfully written exploration of gender and identity. It is also a great, accurate introduction to most of the common themes you'd encounter in a psychology of gender class. In addition, it's a great story and a compelling family drama. You should read it.
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LibraryThing member ImBookingIt
After reading this, I can understand why it won awards, although there were times when I could see but not touch the award winning book.This is a seriously disturbing book at times, although nothing about it is gratuitously shocking, everything that happens has a reason within the story.I'm amazed
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at how real Cal/Calliope was to me. I had more trouble with the stories of the older generations. I found them interesting but not compelling.The book seemed to be following an interesting but predictable path for most of the course of Calliope's childhood. We'd been given enough clues to see where the story was going. The last section (everything after the visit to the doctor)took me almost completely by surprise, in all storylines.I never did figure out why his brother was referred to as "Chapter 11". An Internet search after finishing the book cleared that up.
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LibraryThing member mdonovan
A good read, although I wish the author hadn't teased me with the antagonist's story before launching into that person's family history. I felt like I kept longing to return to the MAIN story.
LibraryThing member rosagallica
This book was just not my cup of tea. I wanted to like it but I just didn't care about the characters. It was well-written but tedious. I don't think I will be reading anything else by this author. I did enjoy reading about old Detroit but that was about all that I like about this book.
LibraryThing member Ambrosia4
To start out with I really loved this novel, I thought it was a brilliant story about a unique (and oftentimes hilarious) family, growing up and defining oneself, and finally about gender identity. I do not put this last carelessly. I really did not see this as a novel purely based on the author's
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desire to publish a commentary on gender-defined roles. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. (Also, at this point I feel to be fair I should say it will be hard to write this without any spoilers, so read ahead at your own risk and know the book is still worth reading.)

The book is broken up into four very distinct parts and this is what makes it hardest to explain or define. To sum up, it could be called a sprawling Greek-American family's epic that segues in the second half into a unique coming-of-age story for a third generation child. What starts out as an immigration story becomes something completely different.

The easiest way for me to explain my feelings about this book is separate it into generations. The story of Lefty and Desdemona's flight from Turkey, clandestine marriage, and beginning a life in America enthralled me. I particularly thought Desdemona's feelings, reactions, and changes were realistic and humorous. Her neuroses played out similarly to my own grandmother's making it easy to imagine her. Lefty was also a well-drawn dimensional character. While he could have easily been flat and boring, his details made him very lifelike.

The second generation lost this a bit. Milton, while an interesting idea, seemed too unbalanced to be real, but was a good foil for Tessie's similarly unlikely character. Milton's personality was too strong too often, while Tessie's simpering, depression bored me. Their teenage selves did not match their grown selves well and the change over was too quick to allow me a chance to adjust. I liked Tessie during her adolescence, but she too quickly disappeared and became her annoying adult version.

Finally, the third generation of Cal and Chapter Eleven once again brought me into the story. I think they need to be looked at together, because while the story is mainly Cal's, Chapter Eleven plays his own part. I liked in particular Chapter Eleven's metamorphosis while at college as it was similar to those I've seen in many of those in my own generation. College is partially about throwing off the box you've been defined by for the past 18 years and partially about finding out where you actually fit. Calliope, later Cal, goes through a similar process, but at an earlier age.

Now to discuss the major plot point of the second half of the book: I saw Calliope's sexual awakening and later gender identity reversal as symbolic (but much more drastic) of the changes all kids go through during adolescence. While the scientific aspects of his case were interesting to read and added a flair of drama not usually present in coming-of-age books, I found the similarities to a normal pubescent teen more striking than the dissimilarities. I think if you read this with the idea that the author is aiming at making grand statements about gender roles in modern life, than you'll be disappointed. If you read it as a narrative about a girl who doesn't know who or what she is, then it becomes an impressive piece of literature.

In all, I really believe you can get out of this book what you want. There will be those who are not impressed with it or are disgusted with the story or will be disappointed that it's not a diatribe against the modern idea of gender. I went into this book knowing a minimal amount about the plot and having no expectations and was very happy with it. I think the author has done an admirable job at following up his first novel, The Virgin Suicides, with another equally well-written novel about a family and coming-of-age while at the same time bringing light to a topic many people know little about. If there is anyone besides me who hasn't read it, I highly recommend it! (Sometimes it seems like I'm the only one who hasn't!)
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LibraryThing member exlibrismcp
The heart of the book is a coming of age story, an individual's struggle to understand one's own evolving self-identity. However, it is not a tale told in a straight forward manner, instead it weaves its way through a multi-layered and multi-generation tapestry. Beginning on Mount Olympus and
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winding its way to Michigan, this story follows the Stephanides family from their Greek heritage to their new American home. Just as the family itself faces difficulties of assimilating into their new world, so too does the narrator Callie face her own troubles assimilating into adulthood. Callie doesn't understand why she never feels like she fits in with all the other girls, until Callie discovers she is actually a hermaphrodite and thus begins her transformation into Cal.

Middlesex is fascinating, epic in scope, and difficult to categorize as a particular type of book. Eugenides uses rich descriptions of background settings and historical context that transports the reader exactly where he needs to be at that moment of the timeline. The slow reveal of the secret that sets Cal up for his genetic destiny is tantalizing as well. With prose that is lyrical and often mesmerizing, this book is one that invites the reader to return again and again to its pages.
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LibraryThing member jmchshannon
There was always something about the title of this 2002 novel that struck me as a bit inappropriate; as a result, I ignored Middlesex for years. Having devoured the audiobook in a matter of days, I truly wish I had forced myself to pick it up sooner, for it will go down as one of my favorite novels
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I've read this year. The entire Stephanides clan moved me to tears, made me laugh out loud, and forced me to take a closer look at this thing called life and all the chance happenings that make us unique individuals.

Middlesex is a story that is indeed epic, crossing continents as well as generations, all while highlighting the importance of love. Desdemona and Lefty, Tessie and Milt, and most importantly Calliope/Cal - each discovers and struggles with love and all its burdens, whether it is love of family, love of self, or love of neighbor. In addition, Mr. Eugenides discusses certain taboos with honesty, integrity, and sincerity, taking the "ick" factor out of the taboo itself.

One of the many lessons in Middlesex is the idea that life is ultimately about the impact of others on an individual's life. At so many times throughout the novel, one small change in one tiny detail could have ended with a completely different result for Callie. Desdemona or Lefty marrying someone else, Milton or Tessie marrying someone else, a doctor with greater observation skills - one change and the entire story would be different.

"The timing of the thing had to be just so in order for me to become the person I am. Delay the act by an hour and you change the gene selection" (p. 11)

Is it fate that Callie would one day become Cal or chance? How can one tell? What does this mean for other individuals?

The way the story is structured, the reader knows about Callie's plight before Mr. Eugenides presents it in all its glory. This juxtaposition between Cal's present and Callie's past is both fascinating, reassuring and quite telling. The reader knows that Cal makes the adjustment he needed to make to thrive in society as a man, yet the reader also knows that Callie will be forced to make difficult decisions. The reader knows what is going to happen and fervently wishes that she or he could step in and prevent Callie's pain. No where is this emotional involvement more prevalent than when Callie discusses her relationship for the Object. Her love for the Object is beautiful, erotic and painfully poignant because the confusion and pain Callie feels is so unnecessary if only one person had changed their course of action. Yet, it is Callie's love that spurs the more dramatic moments and her ultimate decision. Again, is it fate or is it chance?

The narrator, Kristoffer Tabori, did an excellent job of bringing the Stephanides clan to life. His personifications of Desdemona chiding Lefty had me in tears with laughter. His personification of Milton and his relationship with Callie made me reminiscent of my own relationship with my father. As Cal, he becomes a friend, someone I want to protect and help find happiness and acceptance. In essence, Mr. Tabori made the audiobook. I highly doubt I would have had the same reactions or the same emotional connection without Mr. Tabori's narration.

That being said, Middlesex is still an extremely powerful novel that requires no narration for full impact. Mr. Eugenides uses each word brilliantly to create maximum emotional impact within each reader. Simultaneously, his blend of history with its personal connections creates a sense of legitimacy that blurs the line between fact and fiction. The end result is a novel in which the reader is completely absorbed and emotionally involved with a family that is incredibly realistic while being larger than life. Yet, the reader is a better person for having spent time with Desdemona and Lefty, with Milt and Tessie, with Father Mike and Zoe, and especially with Cal. Theirs is a story that truly transcends time.
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LibraryThing member ursula
I'm calling this one done. I read all but the last 30 pages and just can't bring myself to pick it up again and read the rest. A disappointment, since I loved The Virgin Suicides, but what can you do?
LibraryThing member tvordj
Middlesex is a story about a young man who was raised as a girl. His body was the end result of a genetic misfire that both of his parents carried and when he was born, it wasn't obvious that he had physical characteristics of a male so was raised female until the truth came out when he was 14.
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It's fiction, not a biography but is written as one. It starts in the present, then curls back to Greece in his grandparents' day and tells the story of his grandparents and parents and then his own life and how he came to grips with it all.

It also tells the story of 20th century Greece and America and there's taboos, forbidden love, Greek culture which is always threaded through the book. It is about survival of course and family.

It was a good read, a good story and could even make a decent movie or mini series. Then again, they usually screw things like this up so who knows?
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LibraryThing member kambrogi
People will tell you it is a book about a hermaphrodite – Calliope by name -- and to some extent that is true. But that part of the book doesn’t really get in gear until nearly 2/3 of the way through, so the power of the story rests on other elements. First we meet Calliope’s grandparents,
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Lefty and Desdemona, swept away to America by love and the burning of Smyrna in 1922. We discover the terrible secret that will color the lives of their family for generations, genetically speaking. We visit Detroit and its various immigrant communities during the early days of the Ford Motor Company, taking time for the Depression, a World War, Prohibition, the birth of The Nation of Islam, the Detroit Riots, and eventually the summer of love. We share the lives and struggles of three generations of a family as they become Americans, a process that takes up the better part of the 20th century. Through Calliope’s peculiar double-gender vision, we are able to see it like a Picasso painting, from several angles at once.

If you end up loving this book, I predict it will not be due to the unusual subject of hermaphroditism, nor even the riveting front-row seat on history, but rather because of the characters, who will welcome you into their family so completely that you are likely to remember them forever, just as though they were pictured in your own family album.
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LibraryThing member elbakerone
Ambitious in scope and epic in execution, Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides is an amazing story not just for its sweeping family saga but for its remarkable narrator. Calliope "Cal" Stephanides is a hermaphrodite - genetically male but raised as a female - and the genetic mutation that led to his
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condition is rooted in the history of his family. Though Cal is introduced immediately, the majority of the story is told in the past - from Cal's grandparents, Greek immigrants Lefty and Desdemona; to his parents Milton and Tessie.

The unique relationships between the two couples is almost as captivating as their surroundings. Settling in Detroit, Michigan, Lefty and Desdemona's tale corresponds to the city's glory days of Ford. As the next generation takes the focus of the narration, the landscape shifts as well and Cal's parents witness the race riots of the sixties and follow the white exodus to suburban Grosse Pointe, where Cal and his brother are raised.

Eugenides succeeds not only in revealing the complex history of Detroit, but in telling the book with an amazing flair for detail. Some of the characters are painted so richly with personalities that jump off the page while others are classified precisely by their lack thereof. Cal's parents were complete with their own back-stories, hobbies, quirks, and talents; meanwhile Cal's brother is only ever referred to cleverly as "Chapter Eleven". Everything about the story feels real and more than once I found myself running an internet search on a business, neighborhood, or event to distinguish facts from Eugenides's fiction.

I must admit that I had this book on my "To Read" list for a long time and was unfairly prejudiced against the story - which I assumed would revolve primarily around gender identity issues. What I found was a book that did deal with gender and sexuality, but through the eyes of a witty and unique narrator that I came to love, because I was first introduced to his captivating family saga. I was swept up by the Stephanides's history and as Cal interspersed his own struggles into the tale - complete with a decent dose of science and genetics - I felt like a member of the family. I'm also not normally swayed by awards and accolades on book covers, but Middlesex deserves all the praise and attention it has received. I was thoroughly amazed by this book and can easily say it's one of the best I have read this year.
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LibraryThing member Kayla-Marie
Epic is the perfect word to describe this book. Cal is an all-knowing narrator, going into great detail of his grandparents' and parents' lives, which he could not possibly know (having not been present), but you never doubt what he is telling you. You go on the journey with him, from the first
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appearance of the genetic mutation that cropped up due to his grandparents' incestuous relationship to its culmination in Cal's own body, causing him to be born a hermaphrodite.

Eugenides gives each generation of the Stephanides family their due. The reader gets to know the very interesting stories of Lefty and Desdemona's immigration from their burning village in Greece to America's Motor City. The author gives a grand history of Detroit, the beginnings of car factories and division of labor, and the riots of 1967. I can see why Middlesex is considered a good candidate for the title of Great Amerian Novel. I had never read anything that went into such descriptions of Detroit and its pink nights. Usually, when Detroit crops up as a setting in a book, the author pulls a Forrest Gump, merely naming the city and then leaving the reader with "and that's all I have to say about that." I enjoyed getting to know a bit more about Michigan's largest city.

The book continues slowly through the Stephanides' marriage and the birth of Cal's parents, his father being the son of Lefty and Desdemona while his mother is the daughter of Lefty and Desdemona's cousin, which means (you guessed it) Cal's parents are second cousins. This was the second pairing that defined Cal's fate. Of course, no one knew about Cal's intersexuality until he reached puberty, so for quite some time Cal was raised as Calliope.

Once Cal reached age thirteen or so, I started to get impatient for Cal to finally make the big discovery that the book was leading to, and this is the reason for the half-star deduction. The story really started to drag for me around page 350 or so. Cal began to count down to the day when he would be going to the doctor's appointment to check things out and I would start getting excited, thinking We're finally going to get there in this next section, only to be roadblocked with Cal describing each day of that last week in detail, taking up precious pages. But once everything was revealed, I was again hooked to the story and I couldn't read fast enough. I found Cal's psychological growth going from female to male fascinating, and I ended the book very satisfied.
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LibraryThing member ireed110
One of my top two favorite audibooks ever. A complicated yet follow-able tale of three generations. Alot is said about this being a book about a hermaphrodite, and though the main character may be one, this is not what it's about. This book is about family, relationships, people. The reader,
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Kristofer Tabori, has done a remarkable job bringing this story to life.
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1992
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