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In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia--back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of show more the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite. show less

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Member Recommendations

_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.
101
Othemts Multi-generational eccentric families, entrepreneurship, incest, the average made epic - yep, these books have it all!
81
bookmomo share the same exquisite sense of setting: boring, but not terrible suburban America, second half of last century.
93
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.
Also recommended by librorumamans
51
ainsleytewce Both are very American stories, about families in the 20th century, fighting wars, starting businesses, raising families, and both feature a teenage protagonist.
30
sarah-e A character 'passes' in society - dealing with culture and identity.
64
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.
10
paulkid Get a little history of Detroit from the stories of the people who lived there.
amberwitch Similar topic and era
boat-song Contains an amazing chapter on Eugenides and Middlesex, and for those interested in gender, a must read.
22
someproseandcons Both books are family and community sagas centered around secrets, and both books are carried by a strong and compelling voice.
33
CGlanovsky The destiny of an individual and a family bound up with that of a particular time and place.
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ainsleytewce Both begin with immigrants who come to America at approximately the same time.
33
BookshelfMonstrosity These sprawling novels feature an irrepressible and memorable protagonist. The Adventures of Augie March is set in the 1920s and Depression-era America; Middlesex tells the family history -- spanning the 20th century -- of a hermaphroditic main character.
01
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.
JuniperD 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.
23
ljbwell Yes, they are quite different books, and eras, but both explore the complexity of gender & identity.
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Member Reviews

704 reviews
Like the hermaphrodite narrator of Middlesex, my first copy of this novel had extra "body parts," although in my book's case it's duplicative sets of pages 85 through 116, rather than male and female anatomy. The first set was physically in a place it wasn't supposed to be (immediately after page 52), but unlike the narrator's extra parts, my book's deformity didn't cause dysphoria and was easily replaced by a new, sequentially correct copy.*

It seems not merely ironic but somehow appropriate that my book was born malformed. As the half-star rating indicates, I didn't care for this book (when will I learn to stick to my rule not to read Pulitzer Prize winning books published after 1998?). Part of my dislike stems from the books show more organizational style: choppy blocks of narrative, some short as commercials, others the length of documentaries, that alternate between the narrator's family story and her/his present day life. A present day which never becomes germane to the story (more on that later).

Some of my dislike stems from the unending procession of dysfunction in the plot. A Greek brother and sister marry and have two children, then hide their lineage from everyone until the end of the novel (which is supposedly the big reveal). The son from this incestuous relationship marries his cousin; together they have Calliope, the hermaphrodite narrator of the novel. As a result, Calliope's first cousin twice-removed is also her/his grandmother, her/his father is also his parents' nephew and her/his brother is also her/his third cousin. All this nonsense to rationalize the origins of Calliope's genetic deformity.

Primarily, though, I simply dislike the piling on of pointless details that turned what might have been an interesting 200-or-so page story into a 529 page slog. There's a three-hundred word description of the implausible effects a woman fanning herself downstairs has on the household dust upstairs and on a passing car outside. There's a fourteen-year-old runaway in a bus stop walking past a group of priests and magically knowing they are from Sri Lanka, a fact which has zero bearing on the story (if this complaint seems trivial, know that this scene occurred late in the novel when I was suffering severe overload). Here's the same girl earlier, describing herself hiding on the school toilet: "In the basement bathroom was a time frame I felt much more comfortable with, not the rat race of the school upstairs but the slow, evolutionary progress of the earth, of its plant and animal life forming out of the generative, primeval mud." Only an author trying to elevate a meaningless event into cosmic revelation writes that sentence. And most frustratingly, that garbage precedes a perfectly believable scene of the girl's parents lying in bed worrying about her.

In other reviews, I have wondered how the novel being reviewed merited a Pulitzer, a question that arose early in my reading of said novel. Yet I read it through in hope of answering that question by the time I finished. This novel is no different. Early in the book, Calliope pees on the priest performing her baptism, and we are led to believe the urine stream is capable of traveling the miraculous distance it does because she has a penis. Later, however, we learn that her penis has no opening, that her urine comes out from underneath it. Even in a book as fantastical as Middlesex, such an inconsistency shouldn't exist - not in a Pulitzer Prize winning book.

Jeffrey Eugenides, the author, is undoubtedly imaginative and has talent. I read that it took him nine years to finish this novel. My guess is that he spent the first eight on Calliope's heritage, because the novel's conclusion, where she/he finally comes center stage and becomes Cal, feels rushed and incomplete in comparison to the time spent building to the transformation. It reminds me of what Benjamin Dreyer wrote at the end of his book on grammar, Dreyer's English (which I highly recommend): "I think perhaps you don't finish writing a book. You stop writing it."

* - I do wonder whether the previous owner abandoned the book before discovering its defect, thus innocently inflicting it upon me, or sold it after discovery, thus maliciously inflicting it on me for the two or three dollars they got from Half Price Books. Unfortunately I will just have to wonder.
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½
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal."So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is show more not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. show less
Quanto è difficile recensire questo romanzo! Quando l'ho chiuso tutto mi era perfettamente chiaro, sapevo cosa scrivere: le emozioni che avevo provato nella lettura erano esposte davanti a me come tanti quadri in una galleria d'arte. Ora però è diverso: ogni volta che cerco di descrivere cosa ho provato durante la lettura, mi accorgo che saltano fuori sempre nuovi dettagli che portano con loro nuove emozioni, nuovi occhi con cui guardare questo straordinario romanzo e che a loro volta svelano particolari che alla prima lettura non avevo colto. E' in questo modo che, recensire questo libro, si è trasformato per me in un intricatissimo labirinto.
Eppure questa rete di suggestioni, queste immagini cosi ricche di echi sono supportate da show more una narrazione di rara chiarezza e tutt'altro che difficile da usufruire.
Eugenides è un narratore di classe, che non ha bisogno di stupire con effetti speciali e il suo tono colloquiale e brillante è ampiamente sufficiente per aprire interi oceani emotivi nell'animo del lettore.
Davanti agli occhi lettore si dispiega, così, senza intoppi, una storia che riesce ad essere allo stesso tempo epica e personale che, attraverso le vicende della famiglia Stephanides e la voce del suo membro più "particolare", Calliope altrimenti detta "Cal", ci insegna una lezione fondamentale: l'unica via per salvarci è contrapporre ad un sistema che impone uniformità e omologazione, la nostra storia e la nostra irriducibile "specialità".
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Middlesex is beautifully written. Taken only as a love letter to Detroit, it might be a beautiful and compelling tale. But I found Middlesex highly problematic.

There are many acceptable ways to incorporate a gender minority person into a book. A book about a gender minority person's life and struggles can be good -- exposure to that side of life for readers. A book with a gender minority person as an ancillary character whose status is incidental can be good -- normalizing that experience. But Middlesex falls into this uncomfortable middle ground where Cal's intersex status feels exploitative. This isn't a book about being intersex. It's a book about growing up in a Greek immigrant family in a changing Detroit. Being intersex is show more relegated to a B plot as though the book needed some salacious, voyeuristic element to make it sellable and exciting. It feels exploitative.

The ending of the book is particularly problematic. Cal transitions from female-presenting to male-presenting for no apparent reason, and no reason is explained. Intersex is conflated with trans, which is problematic. Cal never presents any gender confusion or male identity previous to the end. Rather, there is this sort of attitude underlying the end of the book as though of course an intersex person would transition to become a man, since male is default. For an author with a history of misogyny (see The Virgin Suicides, or honestly, don't), this is particularly perturbing because it is as though a gender transition is an assumption or an oversight for him.

A lot of people loved this book, including people whose taste in literature I trust. But I cannot in good faith recommend it.
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There's this tendency in contemporary literary criticism, I feel, to treat fiction writing as a near impossible feat, a Herculean labour, and subsequently to heap praise on anyone who manages to pull it off. In Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides set himself a near impossible task --- a sprawling novel encompassing Greek identity and immigration, fifty years of American history, and intersexuality --- and yet, manages somehow to pull it off with grace. That's surely worthy of note.

But there still seems to be something missing in all this. Amidst our awe of the fact that he's doing it, we seem to have forgotten to consider why he's doing it. Is Middlesex a story worth telling (or reading, at any rate)? What I think we find is that, despite its show more expansive scope, Middlesex fails to expand our imaginations. It offers an intimate portrayal of 20th century American life in all its diversity --- and a damn good one, at that --- but portrayal is where it stops. And I guess, hell, I want to see more than just portraits. show less
The Short of It:

Middlesex is smartly written, richly layered and brilliant.

The Rest of It:

I raise one fist (male typically) and begin to beat on the walls of my eggshell until it cracks. Then, slippery as yolk, I dive headfirst into the world”(211).


Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is about Cal Stephanides. Cal is a hermaphrodite and it’s through his narration that we learn about 5-alpha-reductase deficiency and how it affected his development. Cal begins his story in the present day and then takes us back to the beginning, where his grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona make a decision that will forever change his life.

I hesitate to go into too much detail as there is so much to be discovered in this book, and those discoveries should be show more made by you, at your own pace. What I can say, is that Middlesex blew me away. It’s a complex, meaty type of read but the best kind of read…one told with humor and a definite voice.

It’s epic in scope but remarkably readable. The themes of identity, re-birth, transformation, race relations and nature vs. nurture are balanced out with humor and characters that breathe the same air we do. These themes speak to everyone, which is probably why Middlesex won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2003.

I read this novel for my Contemporary Lit class and it was well-received by everyone. Even the non-readers in the class had something to say about this book and although I finished it weeks ago, I am still re-reading passages. It’s definitely one of my faves for 2010.

If this novel escaped your radar when it first came out, I urge you to pick it up now.
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I have very mixed feelings about this book.

The parts about Detroit from young Cal's perspective were electrifying, particularly her perspective on the race riots. That profoundly affected me as both a reader and a writer. Everything I have written since I read Middlesex has been influenced by that part of the book, because it is masterful at depicting something that a child cannot possibly understand through a child's eyes. Any story with a child character could benefit from so profound a sympathy with the way children view the world.

The parts about Greek culture and family life were also interesting to read, especially in relation to the cultural change in America at the time when this novel is set.

The parts about Cal's experience as show more intersex are god-awful. Eugenides clearly did his research when it came to the medical details, but I wonder if the author ever spoke to any intersex people, or even read blogs or books written by them. It would be as if a man writing a woman character did his research by looking up estrogen and ovaries, instead of actually finding out what it's like to live as a woman in our society. It felt sensationalist, insulting, and totally clueless about how gender identity is formed.

I would reread this book, but only the part set in Detroit.
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ThingScore 100
''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 show more 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. show less
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Cnn.com
Sep 9, 2002
Middlesex vibrates with wit, and shapes its outrageous premise (which perhaps owes a partial debt to Alan Friedman’s unjustly forgotten 1972 novel, Hermaphrodeity) into a beguiling panorama of the century in which America itself struggled to come to terms with its motley heritage and patchwork character. A virtuosic combination of elegy, sociohistorical study, and picaresque adventure: show more altogether irresistible. show less
Jul 15, 2002
added by Richardrobert
Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides's ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender.
added by Richardrobert

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Author Information

Picture of author.
33+ Works 50,835 Members
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan on March 8, 1960. He received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. in English and creative writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to in 1993 and was made into a feature film. His other works include Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer show more Prize for Fiction, and The Marriage Plot. He is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Some Editions

Bagnoli, Katia (Translator)
Cholodenko, Marc (Translator)
Lindenburg, Mieke (Translator)
Lindholm, Juhani (Translator)
Nilsson, Hans-Jacob (Translator)
Schönfeld, Eike (Translator)

Awards and Honors

Series

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Common Knowledge

Canonical title
Middlesex
Original title
Middlesex
Original publication date
2002-09-04
People/Characters
Eleutherios "Lefty" Stephanides; Desdemona Stephanides; Milton Stephanides; Theodora "Tessie" Stephanides; Calliope "Cal" Stephanides
Important places
Detroit, Michigan, USA; Berlin, Germany; Smyrna; Grosse Pointe, Michigan, USA; Petoskey, Michigan, USA; Ellis Island, New York, USA
Important events
Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922); Great Fire of Smyrna (1922); Prohibition in the United States (1929); Detroit Riot (1967)
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
"Don't you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?"
I lifted my face and looked into my mother's eyes. And I told her: "This is the way I was."
The textbook publishers would make sure to cover my face. The black box: a fig leaf in reverse, concealing identity while leaving shame exposed.
Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, the workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable ... (show all)to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.
He looked up at me with no expression, blinking. That was Chapter Eleven's way. Everything went on in him internally. Inside his braincase sensations were being reviewed, evaluated, before any reaction was given. I was used ... (show all)to this, of course...He was quiet, blinking. There was the usual lag time while he thought.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I lost track after a while, happy to be home, weeping for my father, and thinking about what was next.
Blurbers
Rushdie, Salman; Foer, Jonathan Safran
Original language
English

Classifications

Genres
LGBTQ+, General Fiction, Fiction and Literature, Historical Fiction
DDC/MDS
813.54Literature & rhetoricAmerican literature in EnglishAmerican fiction in English1900-19991945-1999
LCC
PS3555 .U4 .M53Language and LiteratureAmerican literatureAmerican literatureIndividual authors1961-
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