hadn't read this in a while--had almost forgotten how perfect it is!

The transfiguration of one person’s life based on choices made by others can be drastic. An intriguing tale takes a look into different cultures and societies and the taboos that exist amongst them. The underlying meaning of the book, I feel, is a longing to belong and feel loved despite circumstances that are beyond our control. Although a strange tale it was believable until the end where the story took a turn and became a completely different book. The ending felt like a soap opera turned desperate. ( )

http://letitread.blogspot.com/2009/12... ( )

April 2008 selection of the GB Book Club. This is not what I thought it would be. I had braced myself for something self-consciously shocking and revolutionary, and instead discovered a quietly intimate story of several generations of the Stephanidies family, narrated by the youngest member... who happens to be a hermaphrodite. Cal is more than just the sum of his parts -- if you'll excuse the pun. He's a daughter, a grandchild, an awkward teen, a girl in love... to paraphrase the author, Cal's transformation from girl to boy, while unusual, is no more radical than what happens to each of us in that transformation from birth to adulthood. ( )

einfach ein schönes buch: ich kann mir nicht helfen - die charaktere in diesem faszinierenden buch sind so plastisch und lebendig, dass man glauben möchte, dass es sich um eine wahre biografie handelt, einen auszug aus einer echten familienchronik. ich will nicht viel sagen, aber dieses buch wächst einem ins herz - man beginnt, die ganze familie mit all ihren makeln und schwächen richtig gern zu haben.

2008

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.

“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. ( )

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. ( )

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! ( )

Excellent book - very original ( )

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. ( )

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.) ( )

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. ( )

Spectacular. ( )

Spectacular. ( )

Spectacular. ( )

Definitely the best fiction book I have read this year. I will be checking out other works by this author. The story is woven together so well--the end perfectly meshes with the beginning. I would recommend this book to just about anyone. ( )

The shallow and simplistic pun of the book’s title is emblematic of the superficiality of the entire work. “Middlesex” is the name of the street where Calliope (also referred to as “Callie” and “Cal”) lives with her parents when she reaches puberty. The term also refers, however awkwardly, to the status of Calliope, whose genetic makeup is male, but who was mistakenly raised as a female because of a recessive gene-pairing that caused him to have undescended testes and a negligible penis. The title also has an unavoidable echo of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, where the eponymous town is a stand-in for any quotidian, ordinary town in England, reflective of no extremes of wealth, weather, politics, or culture. Calliope’s upbringing is just that; a middle-class American in the middle of America. However, beyond that single echo, there appear to be no other connections to the themes or characters of Middlemarch.
Other literary references are similarly thin. Indeed, many of the references in Middlesex are there just to show that the author, Eugenides, is well read. For example, the third chapter is entitled, “An Immodest Proposal.” Despite a clear reference to Jonathan Swift’s pamphlet, “A Modest Proposal,” there are no other connections between the two works. Even when Middlesex quotes from T.S. Eliot’s, “The Waste Land,” the strands of connection are strained. The strongest connection appears to be the line in the poem, “Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant,” which is quoted because the author is excited to see his own name invoked by the poet.
In regard to names, Eugenides uses evocative names instead of creating full-bodied characters. The most annoying example is Calliope’s brother, who is referred to only as “Chapter Eleven.” Eugenides gets two-for-one in the name of Calliope’s father, Milton. Explicitly, he is named for both the Greek general Miltiades, and for the English poet John Milton. Unfortunately, his character has nothing to do with either of those historical figures. Desdemona can only point us to “Othello;” yet, as there is no thematic or other connection between “Othello” and Middlesex, the only purpose is to show that Eugenides has read Shakespeare. If that is not the reason, then the choice of the name Desdemona is just another annoyance. The names have more depth than their corresponding characters. Calliope is the muse of epic poetry, best known as Homer’s muse. To state the obvious, Eugenides is no Homer, and Middlesex is not in the same league as The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Eugenides makes fun of Milton’s and Tessie’s pretensions to culture in the small digression where they buy the Great Books series, but then quickly lose interest and the books remain mostly unread. Eugenides makes it clear he has read the Great Books by the many irritating references to them. However, these references are just as thin a veneer of culture as the books on Milton’s and Tessie’s bookshelf. Uncle Pete is only a peripheral character, yet for some unknown reason he merits a Homeric allusion: “Every Sunday he arrived in his wine-dark Buick…” Eugenides cannot be accused of subtlety in his attempts to connect his work to Homer’s. Besides beginning his story with the words, “Sing now, O Muse,” (p.4), there are explicit references to Homer on pages 4, 50, 72, 131, 293, 303, 322, and 329. In the opening pages of Middlesex, the narrator states, “Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times.” (p.4). Would that it were true.
Eugenides’s use of the Greek mythological character of Tireseus is offensive. The conceit is that Calliope, like Tireseus, has had the experience of being both male and female, and therefore has an understanding of the psyche of both sexes. But Tireseus was famous for having been a woman for seven years, while Calliope was raised for fourteen years as a girl. It is rank sexism that Eugenides makes no distinction between being a mature woman and a girl-child. Does Eugendides believe that one gains a real understanding of women by going to a salon to have facial hair waxings? His dismissiveness of women is glaringly apparent in the naming of Callie’s female sex interest as the “Object.” Eugenides’s treatment of blacks is also insulting. The appealing black character of Marius Grimes (another pointless name reference—this time to a Roman general) is last seen by Calliope throwing a Molotov cocktail into her father’s restaurant in the Detroit riots. The Nation of Islam is depicted as a group of submissive and hoodwinked black men and women.

The best piece of fiction I've read. ( )

This sweeping family saga has, at its core, a curious thread, being Cal's gender. Eugenides has packed the ambigiously titled 'Middlesex' with history, science and culture, holding it together with a wry, intelligient narrator who tantalises us with a peek at the future, but compels us to read this long book to find out how it's pieced together. ( )

Fascinating on any number of levels--each generation has unique elements and somehow it all makes sense how an obscure village in Greece and the roaring power of Detroit when big cars were fashionable fits together -- largely through the commonality of off kilter sex. Very well written and fascinating. Would have earned five stars except for a slightly dispassionate feeling I received from the writing--in the end, I'm not sure he cared a great deal for any of them. And somehow that was communicated to the reader. But well worth reading. ( )

Middlesex is a good story with a solid, thought-out plot. I especially appreciated the thorough research behind Cal/Callie's sexual transformation, because it broached a subject I've never explored before. Kudos to Eudengides for taking me behind the scenes of the transexual movement, and making it personal. He blurs the lines of sexual identity, and I like that.

With that said, Middlesex never truly grips me like a really good story should. Rather, it more or less skims the surface of so many other intriguing sub-plots, in the interest of getting to the point of Cal/Callie's story. I agree with some reviews: Eugenides tries to do too much in one book. In my opinion, he goes into so much plot-detail that he often forgets the dialogue, and so fails to draw me into the lives of his characters. The closest I felt to anyone in the Stephanides family was maybe Desdemona, so I'm sad that Eugenides drops her at the beginning and only picks her up towards the end. She was one of the few characters given enough quirkiness and dialogue to potentially come alive as a book-person, and he gave it away.

3 1/2-4 stars. 3 3/4? ( )

I tried reading this novel. The writting doesn't interest me whatsoever.I find that the story drags too much. ( )

Cal Stephanides, Enkel griechischer Einwanderer, die sich in Detroit niedergelassen haben, erzählt seine Familiensaga ausgehend vom Aufbruch der Großeltern aus Smyrna bis zu seinem Leben als Hermaphrodit.
Von Anfang an lässt der Erzähler den Leser nicht im Ungewissen über seine Eigentümlichkeit, Merkmale beiderlei Geschlechts zu besitzen, was bei ihm genetisch bedingt...

2geschichte eines kindes von US- einwanderern aus griechenland, dessen geschlecht nicht klar ist bzw ist er/sie ein zwitter, wächst zuerst als mädchen auf, entwickelt sich zum mann, macht dabei allesmöglich e auch inder familie durch, die gut beschrieben wird. das geshlechterthema wird ausführlich beschrieben ohne je voyoristisch oder peinlich zu sein. ( )