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Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
ISBN: 0312427735
Publisher: Picador - 2002-06-05
Format: Paperback
Book Details Customer Reviews
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Customer Reviews:

Very good novel that doesn't quite live up to its promise to be truly great

I didn't quite enjoy this book as much as I had hoped I would (don't get me wrong though - it's still very good). I've never been convinced that any novel really needs to be much more than 400 pages long, and I suppose this forms the crux of my minor complaint about this novel. Middlesex is one of those multigenerational epic novels that require the reader to commit to the story and characters of the first generation and then transition twice as the story shifts focus onto to the second and third generations while the original characters fall into the background (or die). While there is a common thread or theme that connects the multigenerational tale, essentially these are three separate stories. In the case of Middlesex, the first generation story (the grandparents flee from Asia Minor and become new immigrants in the US) is the most compelling part of the novel. The second tale (kissing cousins marry, have children, and get rich selling hot dogs to the masses) is notably weaker and the novel starts to meander and feel a little bloated. The third portion of the novel focuses on the teenage sexual awakening of hermaphrodite narrator Callie. This should be the primary focus of the novel and yet it ends up feeling strangely rushed at the end. It seems to take a long time for Callie's `condition' to be revealed and acknowledged but once that happens, the story jumps along quickly as if the author started thinking `OK, I guess I should wrap this thing up'. I found the contrived ending involving a ransom from an unlikely source to feel oddly out of place and `tacked on'. The end result for me was that the novel started out strong, gradually began to feel bloated, and then just as it seemed to be getting to the heart of the novel's promised theme, wraps up too quickly.

The story ends while Callie (now Cal) is still a teenager and as a result, the connection between the teenager and the narrator (now in his early 40s) isn't as strong as I would have liked. We don't see the progression and learn how Cal makes the transition to an adult. I'm not asking for another two hundred pages to be added to the novel, but it seemed like Eugenides made some strange choices in deciding where to place the emphasis in his novel. I could have done with less of the Milton and Tessie years. As characters I found them lacking and their story of entrepreneurism in America a little clichÃ©d and thin. I would have preferred instead, greater focus on the Cal years, watching him progress into adulthood.

If I sound like I didn't enjoy this novel that would be wrong. The grandparents are rich and wonderful characters and Callie as a young woman is authentic and fully realized. Eugenides is a talented writer and his prose is exceptionally good. Middlesex is a big, bold novel full of wry humor. Eugenides does an admirable job of blending history into his story and has produced a thought provoking novel that explores the nature of identity. The usual literary devices are evident but not too subtle and not too heavy handed: parallels between silkworms, the new immigrant experience, and sexual duality and re-birth abound.

Readers should note that Middlesex does include some sexual content that might make some people uncomfortable (incest, 14 year old girl sleepovers, and peep shows of the unusual variety). Most people chosing to read a novel about a hermaphrodite probably won't be too shocked, but some people might find the content a little outside their comfort zone.

The bottom line: Middlesex is a very good novel - I just think it could have been brilliant and for me at least, it fell a little short of its promise.

WONDERFUL BOOK

This is the Pulitzer winner.
Over five hundred 5 star ratings.
This is a classic. A marvelously well written novel about generations of a immigrant family, one of whom is very different.
READ THIS BOOK.

Coming of age in 20th century America

I must have read this book 10 years ago and still think about it. This is a universal coming of age story. It's an immigrant tale. It's boy meets girl. It's a tale of Chicago from the 1950's to the present. It has wonderful sentences. It's ingenious. It's family. It's modern America. (It's also hilarious and made me cry).

Middlesex

What a book this was! I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the almost two weeks that I spent reading it. Wow! This is one of those books that I had been meaning to read for years, but I never picked it up. Jeffrey Eugenides' book is about a hermaphrodite, but it is also an enthralling family saga. I love that. Cal is one of those characters that I will remember always, along with that quirky Greek-American family: Milt, Tessie, Desdemona, Lefty, Chapter Eleven, Father Mike, Aunt Zo and on and on. I also enjoyed all the descriptions of the Greco-Turkish War, Detroit over several decades, San Francisco, just a host of things.

accomplishes the near-impossible- turning hermaphroditism into a bestselling topic

I wouldn't give this book five stars based on my personal preference- the author's style and sense of humor relies too much on a somewhat irritating "cuteness" for my taste. But there's no way I could deny that this is a five star work by virtue of accomplishing something I would have thought impossible- turning a story about a hermaphrodite into an international bestseller.

To be sure, Eugenides' acute attention to detail is remarkable, and there's a fair bit of cleverness in the story of the Eugenides family over three generations. For example, the protagonist describes thinking about his parents: "Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh."

Eugenides' take on Detroit, the setting for much of the story, is responsible, if far too tame to counteract the mainstream media's fallacies that somewhat unfairly cripple the city's image today. He properly pins the blame for the city's destruction democratically on not just one race but "all these people coming from everywhere to cash in on Henry Ford's five-dollar-a-day promise," while acknowledging racist systemic factors holding down the black population ("Desdemona realized now why there was so much trash in the streets: the city didn't pick it up. White landlords let their apartment buildings fall into disrepair while they continued to raise the rents.").

Still, this felt like a timid work, entertaining but not enlightening or moving, until about page 400 when the protagonist finally visits a sexologist to clear up the mystery of his/her gender. At this point the book delves into a heavy handed background of the biological and cultural aspects of hermaphroditism, astutely concluding that "Sex is biological. Gender is cultural. The Navajo understand this." Much like the protagonist doesn't tell dates upfront that he/she is a hermaphrodite, the author patiently waits 400 pages to properly delve into the subject when the time is right.

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Editorial Reviews:

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.

Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.

"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 of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.

Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:

Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." â¦ I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons

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