Hide this

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Loading...

Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations
13,27528858 (4.15)388

Member recommendations

  1. amberwitch recommends Running With Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs
  2. amberwitch recommends Sugarless by James Magruder, "Similar topic and era"
  3. infiniteletters recommends Labor of Love: The Story of One Man's Extraordinary Pregnancy by Thomas Beatie
  4. Booksloth recommends Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières
  5. dfreeman2809 recommends Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters, "Both are (at least partially) historical novels with strong themes of identity, coming of age, and going against the mainstream to stay true to what you (see more) feel is right. Although one is set in Victorian England and the other isn't, they both have that same feel of rich language and descriptive place."
  6. Othemts recommends The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving, "Multi-generational eccentric families, entrepreneurship, incest, the average made epic - yep, these books have it all!"
  7. jacr recommends How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz
  8. jacr recommends The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton Studies in American Politics) by Thomas J. Sugrue, "A scholarly discussion of the decline of Detroit and its race riots. People who liked Eugenides's fictional account of Detroit might be interested in (see more) this historical version."
Loading...
won't like will probably not like will probably like will like will love

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

English (284)  Portuguese (1)  Italian (1)  Swedish (1)  Spanish (1)  All languages (288)
Showing 1-5 of 284 (next | show all)
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 vote 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 vote 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 vote jeffome | Nov 8, 2009 |
Showing 1-5 of 284 (next | show all)
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.
added by SqueakyChu | editGuardian, Mark Lawson (Oct 5, 2002)
 
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.
added by Shortride | editTime, Richard Lacayo (Sep 23, 2002)
 
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.
 
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Series (with order)
Canonical Title
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Dedication
For Yama, who comes from a different gene pool entirely
First words
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.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (3)

Intersexuality

Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex (novel)

Book description

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)

(see all 5 descriptions)

The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details.

Quick Links

Ebooks Audio Swap
3 pay2 pay236/255+

Popular covers

 

Help/FAQs | About | Privacy/Terms | Blog | Contact | LibraryThing.com | APIs | WikiThing | Common Knowledge | 45,811,730 books!