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Loading... Middlesexby Jeffrey Eugenides
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A terrific long story and family history of a hermaphrodite. Engrossing writing, especially the part about his/her falling in love with The Object of Desire, which had been in the New Yorker. Became less believable and less well-written when she decided to become a boy. The rest was so realistic, though, it made me wonder if it was true. (  )bobbieharv | Jun 24, 2009 |   I listened to the audio and thoroughly enjoyed it! Eugenides won the 2003 Audie Award and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. The audio used music of the story's time period to transition between episodes. I really liked the early pieces (Artie Shaw, Jack Benny); the clarinet was my instrument during high school. Calliope, the narrator, tells about her family's history and how they came to America from Greece. The family background set the stage for significant events that would occur later in the book, when Callie was born ... and then later as Cal was "born" again. The other characters Lefty, Desdemona, Tessie, Milton, Chapter 11, and “the object” were memorable and authentic! Eugenides in a brief interview at the end of the novel described how writers use a hermaphrodite mindset to write from perspective of the opposite sex. He also tells of a grant he received to go to Germany and live, studying the country, its people and history, allowing time to write books. It must be nice to have expenses paid and able to pursue a writing career. Eugenides’s literary worth has certainly been realized. Don’t miss this one! (  )SFM13 | Jun 22, 2009 | 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 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. ( )CatyM | Jun 16, 2009 | 1  http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1236000... I was rather expecting this to be a sober and gruelling tale of conflicted sexual identity. I was almost completely wrong. Middlesex is largely an exuberant tale of growing up as a girl in a Greek-American family. The first delight is the complex background of her grandparents, brother and sister who escape from the inferno of Smyrna in 1922 and marry each other in a secretly incestuous union. Then there is a tough but engaging depiction of the Greek-American community of Grosse Pointe and Detroit, against the background of mid-century America: the Depression, the war, the riots of the 1960s, and the moment of truth in the 1970s when Chekhov's gun goes off, and Cal chooses to be male after fourteen years of being a girl. Rather as Romeo and Juliet works partly because we are told up front by the Chorus that the title characters are going to die, Middlesex is absolutely clear about what is going to happen, and its charm is the clarity with which it is all laid out. I have absolutely no idea how relevant or true to life it is for readers who have themselves grappled with gender identification issues (and would be very interested to hear reactions from such quarters); it certainly raised my consciousness while also entertaining me greatly. Strongly recommended. ( )nwhyte | Jun 10, 2009 | 1 Eugenides weaves the various storylines together into an interesting and coherent tale. The central character of Calliope/Cal is an interesting device and one which raises some interesting issues - I don't want to give too much away and spoil this for any potential readers - but I shall be thinking about this book for some time. (  )riverwillow | Jun 10, 2009 | 0.024 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com (ISBN 0312427735, Paperback)"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." … 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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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