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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. 2008   katiemertz | Nov 21, 2009 |  I found the narrator Cal really engaging and really appreciated the unflinching nature of the stories about the family. When I think back about the details, they could be pretty depressing, but the story was not, and I didn't spend time pitying anyone. I know the story is already quite long, but I would've liked to know more about how Cal felt about the question of what to do when he found out. I got frustrated in the middle when it was taking a long time to read, but I enjoyed the characters and the story. 1  alwright1 | Nov 12, 2009 | “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 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. (  )1 SheilaDeeth | Nov 11, 2009 | To be honest, I found this book deeply disturbing, and had a hard time identifying with the protagonist. Normally I pride myself on my open-mindedness when it comes to literature, but I couldn't deal with it--the incestuous brother-sister relationship, the mermaid-stripper, the protagonist her/himself--it lost me. If you think you can handle it, I applaud your constitution. But count me out on Eugenides for the conceivable future. (  ) krysbrezinski | Nov 10, 2009 | OK book. These multi-generational tomes get a little tedious for me sometimes with the bouncing back and forth and all the connectivity and relationships of everyone....felt it would have been easier had i had a chart to accompany the book as i read....took awhile to get thru and i'm not sure if it was my life at the time or the book or both. Ultimately enjoyed it, but sometimes seemed like work. I learned something as well, which is always good! (  )1 jeffome | Nov 8, 2009 | 
 This novel repeats the stand-out achievements of The Virgin Suicides: an ability to describe the horrible in a comic voice, an unusual form of narration and an eye for bizarre detail. 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.  Some of this footloose book is charming. Most of it is middling. 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'' 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. 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. The book displays the same sort of knowing portraits of adolescence that ''Virgin Suicides'' did, but this novel is at its most incisive not as a bildungsroman about teenage angst and gender confusion, but as a ''Buddenbrooks''-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream.
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| Book description |
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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)
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