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Loading... Middlesex (original 2002; edition 2010)by Jeffrey Eugenides
Work InformationMiddlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A family tale, an individual's journey, and a very different learning experience--I knew so little about gender confusion. ( ) It's hard to summarize this book succinctly, and I understand the feeling that it brings together a host of narratives and feelings, many of which not obviously thematically linked. Nevertheless, to me the very improbability of their occurrence is somehow more compelling; this is a fictional account of real experiences that captures something particular about each of them. For me, I took away so much. The literal American saga of the expulsion from war, immigrant experience and struggle, the Great Depression, the second war, the postwar boom, the 60s, the 70s. Race riots, white flight, San Francisco, the morphing and multiple views on religion, sex and life. The sensation of feeling out of place, at the bottom of the heap. The reassurance of the present-day narration. The repetitive cycles of life, the motifs that return, the lessons learned, the people along the way. The tropes, even. The secrets, the shame, the confusion, the inability to communicate, the struggle of making it work. Unchanging natures. The old men nattering. The teenagers. The fundamental existence of people, somehow, the contrast to the hubris of the present, to mine perhaps. Icarus rather than Prometheus. Apparently, a review full of sentence fragments at 5am. It's good, read it. I'm not quite sure what made me keep reading this book I found on the list of Pulitzer Prize winners. Maybe it was the family drama, or the way Eugenides effortlessly moved his characters through history while keeping everything relevant to the context of Calliope's story. Something did make me keep reading though, and by the end I was closely attached to the fates of the characters and inspired by the way Calliope comes out of this tumultuous journey which started even before she was born.
''Middlesex'' is a novel about roots and rootlessness. (The middle-sex, middle-ethnic, middle-American DNA twists are what move Cal to Berlin; the author now lives there too.) But the writing itself is also about mixing things up, grafting flights of descriptive fancy with hunks of conversational dialogue, pausing briefly to sketch passing characters or explain a bit of a bygone world. ''The Virgin Suicides'' is all of a piece, contained within the boundaries of one neighborhood; ''Middlesex'' -- a strange Scheherazade of a book -- is all in pieces, as all big family stories are, bursting the boundaries of logic. Belongs to Publisher SeriesOtavan kirjasto (158) Is contained inHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents' desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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