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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. 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! (  ) jeffome | Nov 8, 2009 |  Excellent book - very original (  ) jordanwood23 | Nov 1, 2009 | Stunning: the writing is gorgeous, the story mesmerizing. From the first sentence, when the narrator states 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, the reader knows this is going to be a wondrous ride, and it doesn't disappoint. (  ) auntmarge64 | Oct 30, 2009 | Calliope Stephanides was born a girl, then at the age of 14 discovered she is actually genetically male. Though narrated by Cal, this story actually begins in 1922 with Cal's grandparents fleeing Turkey for America. The imagery in this book was haunting, the characters unforgettable, and the scope incredibly vast. As long as you're not squeamish about ideas that go against the sexual norm, this is one seriously engrossing book.(A note on the audio version of this book: the reader is phenomenal. Quite possibly the best I've ever heard. If you find the text version hard to get through, I highly recommend picking up the audiobook. It's simply superb.) ( ) melydia | Oct 28, 2009 | Reading this book got me thinking about intersexuality and society's response to it. *semi-spoiler alert*: I will not divulge too much about the plot, but I will extrapolate on the narrator's life choices. The narrator is raised as a girl, Calliope, until the age of 14. At this point, an ER doctor notices something different about her, and her parents respond by taking her to a line of doctors ending with a sexologist in NYC. No one--the doctor or her parents--are completely honest with Callie about what is going on with her body. In fact, the doctor is not even completely forthcoming with her parents. The three of them decide that the best course of action is to give her hormone shots so she'll grow breasts, and give her reconstructive surgery "down there" so she'll look more like a girl. Left alone in the doctor's office, Callie reads a report about herself and discovers that she is genetically male, with androgen insensitivity syndrome. When she realizes that the doctor and her parents want her to undergo surgery, she runs away. Callie's first act upon fleeing is to buy a thrift-store suit; her second act is to visit a barber to cut off her long hair. She starts calling herself "Cal" and begins to identify as male. As adult narrator, Cal comments that he was okay with being a girl, and in fact that he was uncomfortable with masculinity in a way that he was never uncomfortable with femininity. He says that the reason he began to male-identify is that it most conveniently aligned with his desires; by this I am assuming he means his attraction to women. A couple of things about this story bother me: 1. The sudden shift in Cal's gender identity. 2. The fact, mentioned in the book, that her condition should have been noticed and "corrected" at birth. I think these issues go hand-in-hand. Starting with #2: In instances of hermaphroditism, doctors will approach the new parents and say something like, "Your daughter blah blah blah so we are going to do a simple procedure to correct this." They don't say, "Your baby is a hermaprhodite" and let the parents choose the best course of action. But even if parents were given the choice, what is the best course of action? Callie, raised as a girl, suddenly discovers that she is genetically XY and just as suddenly begins to gender-identify as a male. This does not make sense to me. Why not remain female? The reason given by the narrator does not satisfy me. I do not see how changing gender identity solves anything. What does make me happy about Cal's decisions is that he does not undergo surgery, but remains physically hermaphroditic. Why, in our culture, is that such a taboo thing? I think that intersex people--infants included--should be left to make their own choices about their physiology, sexuality, and gender identity. Doctors should be up-front and honest with parents of new-borns. Parents should not be so deterministic in molding their child into one of two genders. Why not acknowledge the third option? I believe that encouraging self-love will contribute far more to a well-balanced, contented individual than insisting upon conformity with limited and limiting social constructs. We need to open up space in our social construction site for the people who exist on the outside, or who exist within constructs that don't really fit. Society-at-large needs to stop pretending that there are only two genders and welcome the alternatives with open arms or, at least, open minds. ( ) jeca_jean | Oct 27, 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.
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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