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A terrific novel! Mar 25, 2003 (348 of 363 found this helpful)
From the first sentence of Jeffrey Eugenides' MIDDLESEX, I was hooked by this complicated tale of a young girl who grows into a man. The story of Cal Stephanides begins generations before his birth, in a small Greek village, when his grandparents succumb to incestuous desires. Immigration to the United States keeps Desdemona and Lefty's secret intact - until their grandchild Cal reaches puberty. Told with both humor and earnestness, the story grows more engaging with every page.
The brilliance of this book emerges not from the superficial story of a hermaphrodite but from the context - historical, scientific, psychological, political, geographical - of Cal's birth and subsequent rebirth. MIDDLESEX is about much more than gender confusion. Cal's mixed gender can be taken as a metaphor for the experience of first- and second-generations born of immigrants.
While the context of this story provides the substance, the characters provide the vibrancy. Cal emerges as a reliable and likeable narrator. He is sensible, good-humored, and intelligent. The spectrum of his experiences provides a smooth transition between childhood and adult, enabling the reader to embrace the character as both male and female. Cal's family is affectionately portrayed, even with their failings. (Cal's brother, Chapter Eleven, annoyed me with his name, a running gag, but even he ended up a full-blooded character by the end.)
Eugenides has written an expansive, compelling book. Despite its length of over 500 pages, the novel is not a slow read - unless the reader wants it to be, to make it last. Accessible, intelligent, well-paced and plotted, it should appeal to a wide range of readers.
I can't recommend this novel highly enough.
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4 1/2 * Pulitzer Prize Winner is Excellent Apr 4, 2003 (46 of 51 found this helpful)
Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" belongs to the sprawling intergenerational book genre, but he explores themes with a fresh perspective. Calliope (later Cal) is the omniscient narrator of a story that begins in 1922 Smyrna, Asia Minor and ends almost 80 years later in Berlin. Most of the story takes place in Detroit, a city that he describes with great insight and emotion. Eugenides expertly switches between the voices of the grown-up Cal and the young Calliope; therefore, we experience events as Calliope did, but with the perspective of Cal (at age 40). Calliope is a winning storyteller, observant, funny, and with realistic childhood and adolescent feelings. Throughout the book, Eugenides demonstrates that Callie's circumstances underlie experiences shared by all: Pain, love, confusion, feelings of being both the same as and different from. I think Eugenides somewhat underestimates the emotional toll that Callie's journey would entail, particularly during her long separation from her family as she makes the psychological transformation from Calliope to Cal. Usually; however, the insights and feelings are so true that it reads like an autobiography.
While the story is compelling, there are some problems that interfere with a fluid read. At times, narrative transitions are handled awkwardly through either through over use of ellipses (...) or with somewhat clunky sentences: 'Milton stepped on the gas, ignoring the scarcity not only of petroleum but of many other things as well,' which breaks into a long list of scarce hope, food, phone calls, clean socks, etc. He also overplays his hand at the Greek tragic motif he is constructing ('Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation'!'; though he later, in apparent contradiction, concludes that we can forge our own truer identities) and in his broad caricatures of ethnic and religious types. There's also a sly quality that sets up "surprise" situations: In the most egregious case of 'magical realism,' or just plain gimmickry, Eugenides uses the conceit of using his fictional character 'Jimmy Zizmo' as the 'real' identity of the actual character, Nation of Islam Muslim founder W.D. Farr, and the denouement concerning Calliope's father and uncle lacks credibility. Mostly though, Eugenides' story is compelling and humorous, and he masterfully evokes place and character (industrial Detroit; a hilarious indictment of an ultra-hip 1970s-era surgeon/sexologist), with a casual ease that nicely belies the serious themes.
The book bears some resemblance to Michael Chabon's own Pulitzer Prize winner, "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." In both, the immigrant experience and the forging of a new identity are central, characters journey to find their own "American dream," and urban settings help shape their lives. While Chabon is the more nimble phrase writer, Eugenides is similarly poignant and symbolic. Like Chabon, Eugenides uses metaphor (based on reality) as he explores the ideas of being 'different,' the sometimes-artificial nature of boundaries, and the Greek notion of fate. It is an entertaining and often moving story that, despite some minor annoyances, I recommend very highly.
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An entertaining but flawed novel Apr 1, 2003 (41 of 45 found this helpful)
I found much of this book quite enjoyable, but ended up feeling that Eugenides had not quite lived up to his promise.
The novel follows three generations of the Stephanides family, and it faces a general problem with such multigenerational works --it's hard to get the reader deeply involved in the lives of the grandparents, then put these characters aside and transfer one's interest to the parents, and then finally to make a third transfer of interest to the children.
Eugenides succeeded in getting me interested in the grandparents (Desdemona and Lefty), their escape from Turkey, and their life in America. But the second generation, Milton and Tessie, was less compelling. Milton becomes a cliche'd Archie Bunker sort of character, and Tessie isn't well-developed at all. They are not very interesting or memorable characters, and we spend way too much time with them.
Cal/Callie's story is fascinating, but it seems to end far too soon. The book ends shortly after s/he has discovered and accepted her transgendered nature at age 15. But the narrator is roughly 40, and we don't get to learn anything about the intervening 25 years. How did Cal get from being a newly discovered boy to being a diplomat in Germany? What was his life like in the intervening years? And what is it like now?
There are real flashes of brilliance in this book, but ultimately I was disappointed and feel that it doesn't come together.
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Woven Fate Nov 26, 2002 (31 of 33 found this helpful)
Though Middlesex's leading man(Cal)/lady(Callie) is a hermaphrodite, the book spends only a few of its pages exploring what it is like to view, or experience, the world from the perspective of both sexes at once. So if this is what you are looking for in the book, you will surely be disappointed. Rather, the book's principal theme is more universal: how little control we have over who we become. Eugenides narrative skillfully reveals how but for this or that event, each of his characters would not be who they are. For example, Cal/Callie would not have been born a hermaphrodite but for her paternal great-grandparents' deaths, her paternal grandfather not having any other attractive woman to marry, a massacre in Turkey, her maternal grandfather's jealousy and doubts of paternity, World War II, etc. The book uses silk cocoons as a metaphor for the tangled histories that make us all who were are, an unwinding string that goes back far beyond our expectations. Though, as one reaches the last quarter of the book, the disparate strands of silk spin together, explaining Cal/Callie's decision to run away and the intertwined fate of her father. I had read this book a couple of month's after reading Gaille's The Law Review, which grappled with this same problem of how much control we have over where we wind up. One passage from that book also rings true for Eugenides' characters in Middlesex, too: "Decision. I think decision itself is a misnomer. It implies that a choice existed for me at the final moment. More often than not, though, one becomes embroiled in adversity not from a single bad decision, but rather from a series of little decisions that were fine when they were made." Such is the fate of us all.
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Middlesex is an insightful novel Jun 15, 2007 (24 of 26 found this helpful)
Reading a novel about a hermaphrodite is something I never thought I would enjoy, but I was wrong. Middlesex is an excellent book. Jeffery Eugenides is a talented and insightful writer. He describes how Greek immigrants of both sexes had to work hard to survive in Detroit in the early part of the 20th century. Lefty is a fictional character in the novel. I loved reading about how hard he worked to improve his life. He started working at a factory making car engines, and he worked diligently to become a successful bar owner. Eugenidies' description of the race riots in Detroit in 1967 is very vivid. I could picture people looting shops and setting them on fire. I have no idea how a hermaphrodite feels, and I think Eugenides does a good job writing about how it feels to live as one. The main character is a hermaphrodite named Callie. Eugenides writes about Callie's confusion and frustration about not developing like other girls as a teenager. This is very moving. He also writes about her experiences with drugs and having sexual relations with a female classmate. Middlesex is very much a coming of age novel because of the self exploration element. I enjoyed reading how Callie's parents loved and treated her unconditionally. Middlesex is a novel that reminds people to accept and embrace individuals with gender differences.