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Loading... Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (original 2002; edition 2002)▾LibraryThing recommendations  8 0_debbie_: 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 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.… (more) 71 A Widow for One Year by John Irving (readerbabe1984)71 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (sipthereader)61 The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving (Othemts)Othemts: Multi-generational eccentric families, entrepreneurship, incest, the average made epic - yep, these books have it all! 53 The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (bookmomo)bookmomo: share the same exquisite sense of setting: boring, but not terrible suburban America, second half of last century. 10 Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (someproseandcons)someproseandcons: Both books are family and community sagas centered around secrets, and both books are carried by a strong and compelling voice. 21 As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto (librorumamans, librorumamans)librorumamans: The connection of this book to Middlesex is Eugenides' character, Dr Luce, who appears to be modelled on Dr John Money of Johns Hopkins University. As Nature Made Him is a non-fiction account of Money's experimental (and unsuccessful) sex reassignment of David Reimer, whose botched infant circumcision left him genitally mutilated.
Both books compellingly look at the complexity of gender identity.… (more) 43 The Human Stain by Philip Roth (sarah-e)sarah-e: A character 'passes' in society - dealing with culture and identity. 10 Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin (Anonymous user)10 How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz (jacr)10 Labor of Love: The Story of One Man's Extraordinary Pregnancy by Thomas Beatie (infiniteletters)10 Anywhere but Here by Mona Simpson (ainsleytewce)ainsleytewce: Both are very American stories, about families in the 20th century, fighting wars, starting businesses, raising families, and both feature a teenage protagonist. 11 Intersex: A Perilous Difference by Morgan Holmes (boat-song)boat-song: Contains an amazing chapter on Eugenides and Middlesex, and for those interested in gender, a must read. 00 Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières (Booksloth)00 Getting ghost : two young lives and the struggle for the soul of an American city by Luke Bergmann (paulkid)paulkid: Get a little history of Detroit from the stories of the people who lived there. 00 Sugarless by James Magruder (amberwitch)amberwitch: Similar topic and era 00 The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (2810michael)00 The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue (jacr)jacr: 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 this historical version. 00 Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes by T Cooper (susanbooks)01 Annabel by Kathleen Winter (BookshelfMonstrosity, BookishJoJo)BookshelfMonstrosity: Annabel follows the life of a hermaphrodite who was not masculine enough to please his father. The novel explores themes of family relations, gender roles, and sexual identity similar to those in Middlesex. BookishJoJo: While reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Annabel is a compelling and accomplished debut novel about one person’s struggle to discover the truth in a culture that shuns contradiction.
Annabel offers some hard themes for readers. It is the story of an intersex child born in a remote coastal Labrador village in 1968. Primarily, I feel, Winter has written an homage to self-determination and self-preservation. An intersex child is born with atypical reproductive anatomy – both male and female anatomy are present. Advocates for intersex infants argue against surgical alterations of gentalia and reproductive organs being performed in order to accommodate societal expectations of what it means to be male or female in the world. This choice forms the centre of Winter’s novel.… (more)
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For Yama, who comes from a different gene pool entirely  | |
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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. | |
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Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (4)
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Three generations of a Greek American family find themselves plagued by a mutant gene which causes bizarre side effects in the family's teenage girls. | |
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▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0312422156, 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 Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:27:55 -0400) (see all 5 descriptions) ▾Library descriptions 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. (summary from another edition) » see all 8 descriptions |
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