Middlesex
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Product Description
‘I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an urgent situation room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license records my first name simply as Cal.’ So starts the breathtaking tale of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family tree who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they go out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan. To know why Calliope is not like additional girls, she has to uncover a guilty family tree secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, “Middlesex” is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.Amazon.com Review
“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 urgent situation room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” And so starts Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family tree and the “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time.” The odd but utterly believable tale of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-ancient 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 tree history, from a fateful incestuous union in a tiny 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 like tale to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides’s mandate of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie’s shifting voices convincingly, spinning this weird and regularly unsettling tale with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:
Emotions, in my experience aren’t covered by single words. I don’t judge in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” … I’d like to have at my disposal intricate 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 clarify my life, and now that I’ve entered my tale, 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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This book has all the commonplace sensational ingredients of a
Jerry Springer show — incest, the dysfunctional family tree, gender
confusion. Etc. My advice is to go watch a kids sports event.
You will learn more about human scenery, and have more fun, than
reading another derivative work (incredible that anyone would reflect
this book is “original”).
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Mr Eugenides writes a really compelling book – Cal is appealing and compelling, and the tale he weaves will keep you hooked from start to end.
But, I have one large problem with the book as a whole, and that’s the lack of research Mr Eugenides place into two tiny details which really shouldn’t have taken him more than 20 minutes to find.
You see, as an adult, Cal works for the Foreign Service. Fine and dandy – except that Cal claims to have a German driver’s license in Berlin, and that he wants to work for the US Embassy in Istanbul.
Um, sorry, Mr Eugenides. IMy spouse DOES work for the Foreign Service, and if you had taken a few moments, you’d know that it’s a CONSULATE in Istanbul, and that American citizens do not get driver’s licenses for the countries they serve in. Our American ones do just fine, in addition to our Diplomatic ID cards.
Now, if you can snub persons tiny details – and since they in no way really affect the whole of the book, it’s a very simple thing to do – then you won’t have any problem enjoying it. But since Mr Eugenides messed up these two very simple facts – I have a hard time believing that anything else he tells me can possbily be based in reality.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
I read this book for my book club and was one of two who really finished the novel. Not a single member of the club loved it and reviews all around were terrible.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I gave the book one star, but it didn’t even deserve that much. This book was recommended by a friend. So our book club agreed to read Middle sex. I must say if your having troubles sleeping start reading this book it will place you right to sleep.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Jeffrey Eugenides confessed to me on 4 June 1995. Neither sacramental nor private, the confession took place not in a coffin turned on its side but on the pages of “The New York Times,” and concerned itself with that travelling mad priest of stage antics, Ian Anderson and Anderson’s “incomparable” (Eugenides’ word) band Jethro Tull (“Hand Me My Air Guitar. I’m Still a Jethro Tull Freak”). Tull is my favorite band and the photo accompanying the article, as I remember, showed Anderson in an iconic pose, perched on one leg playing flute in his unorthodox self-taught style, one hand on the flute while the additional, raised in a flourish like a puppeteer’s above the flute, drew out the airy composition. (A note for Jeffrey, who mentioned in the article that at age sixteen he and his two best friends smoked an enormous joint at the Pontiac Silverdome while Tull was pounding out “Locomotive Breath:” I saw Tull at the Universal Amphiteater, Universal City, California, in November 1984 in what was to have been the first of three performances there that month. After a few songs, Anderson questioned “What’s that smell?” as he approached the front of the stage. He then confronted about three teenage boys or young men in or near the front row with his shabby voice – it was the last stop on that tour of North America – with words approximately these: “Place out your BLOOD-Y MAR-Y-JUANA. I despise the smell of that stuff and it’s not helping my voice any, which, if you haven’t noticed, is terrible enough. If you don’t, I’ll walk off this stage and you’ll have ALL these people (Anderson made a sweeping gesture around the audience with the flute) mad at you. You wouldn’t want that now, would you?” The show went on, but I judge the next two shows were cancelled. Anderson is reasonably against the use of illegal drugs and must have been at least partly disappointed by the pundit from the band’s very early days who called him a “crazed flamingo on speed” doubtless because of Anderson’s whirling like a dervish, manic gestures and noises, and one-legged poses.)
Early in 2006, a co-worker who teased me about the women I date, pulled me aside and told me I had to read “Middlesex.” Had I not been primed by Eugenides’ 1995 article on Tull, I probably would have resisted more and ultimately fended off the book. But I accepted it. Immediately skimming the book, I opened to page 184 of the paperback edition and establish these words: “Asian chicks are the last stop. If a guy’s in the closet, he goes for an Asian because their bodies are more like boys’.” I, a washboard-stomached man’s man who, while believing that gorgeous women hail from many parts of the globe, have, and for no tiny part this is due to my novice knowledge of Mandarin, dated many lovely Chinese women, was chagrined. “Ha!” I glared at my friend. “That’s where you got persons crazy comments about my dating Chinese women.” She laughed. (I reflect that east Asian women, by the way, are regularly reasonably feminine, for what it’s worth. I also know that Eugenides may be married to a woman of Japanese descent.) And so I started to read “Middlesex.”
Having read the book, it is not fake humility but deference to reality to report that I consider myself poorly qualified to critique a novel. While I like fiction, I consume much more non-fiction, and I am confident that some of the complexity of such a long novel eludes me. But I will challenge Eugenides on one tiny but to me vital point, one made over the space of just a few lines, on page 221 (again, of the paperback edition) where Eugenides has these words of the narrator Calliope/Cal: “…I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, lacking an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it started.” Catholicism traces its origin directly to Christ himself. I wish to set up here that Catholicism called itself catholic from the early decades of the faith. To do so, I appeal to St. Ignatius of Antioch, venerated by Catholics and Orthodox as a martyr and canonized in both faiths as a saint. St. Ignatius was the third bishop of Antioch (St. Peter was the first). Ignatius’ martyrdom (by beasts in an arena) occurred circa A.D. 110. He wrote in his “Letter to the Smyrneans” that “[w]herever the bishop appears, let the people be there; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church” (from William A. Jurgens “The Faith of the Early Fathers,” Volume One, 1970, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, page 25). Fr. Jurgens remarks in a footnote that this is the earliest use of the term “Catholic Church.” Note that this occurred reasonably early in the second century. And to the Catholics and Orthodox who accept that the Church should breathe with both lungs, Calliope/Cal’s narrating words that at its beginning Christianity was Greek and not Latin seem very tendentious. Yes, the dominance of Greek influence over Latin influence yielded to Latin dominance as the legacy of the golden age of Greek civilization faded and as Christianity spread, but Catholics and Orthodox alike know that, for example, Sts. Peter and Paul suffered martyrdom in Rome, and additional examples of Latin influence on the nascent Church could be open.
3.5-4 stars, I suppose.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5