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Loading... Middlesex (2002)by Jeffrey Eugenides
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» 76 more Best family sagas (15) Favourite Books (235) Favorite Long Books (24) Five star books (66) Unreliable Narrators (17) Books Read in 2016 (211) A Novel Cure (96) Top Five Books of 2017 (101) Top Five Books of 2013 (1,269) 2000s decade (10) Top Five Books of 2019 (121) Epic Fiction (18) Books Read in 2020 (997) Overdue Podcast (120) Books Read in 2010 (31) Books Read in 2019 (1,248) Elegant Prose (32) Best First Lines (68) USA Road Trip (6) A's favorite novels (61) Secrets Books (77) Books tagged favorites (279) SHOULD Read Books! (84) AP Lit (203) Romans (46) 2005-2010 (2) Teens (5) Books on my Kindle (147) Historical Fiction (849) Tagged 20th Century (29) Biggest Disappointments (542) Unread books (913) No current Talk conversations about this book. Simply one of the greatest books I have ever read, and a deserving winner of the Pullitzer. Stunning. ( ![]() First edition fine I use this book to kill large pretentious bugs. This is a beautiful book, full of great images and dialogues, filled with prose that is really, really good. The characters are great and perspire the truthfulness that comes from writing about one's culture to be seen by the "mainstream", whether it's cultural (as the characters are greek-americans) or sexual. I couldn't suggest any improvements to the book, since it's really solid, though some of the portrayals border on the charicaturesque, maybe due to stereotypes that are not the author's fault but which undoubtedly have their weight on the reader (the old wise grandmother, the selfish second-generation immigrant, etc). What I missed, as I was approaching the end, was another look at Cal's adult life. We spent so much time on his grandparents and parents that it seems we barely get to know him/her before the book's over. I guess that's just the way it had to be, since most of life's strongest experiences are when we find out who we are, usually in adolescence. But watching the character cope with his condition was like an afterthought in a book that is, ostensibly, about a rather complicated-to-put-your-head-around theme. So I wished we got more than a glimpse at adult Cal and his relationship with Julie, too. Overall, a must-read for anyone that likes beautiful prose and quirky characters with a good dose of social commentary on the "Americana" circa 1930-1970. Recessive genes meet in a Greek family which emigrated to the US in the 1920s and produce an intersex child. Interesting enough while I was actually reading it but I had very little urge to pick it up again after interruptions for food, sleep, family, etc. so it took a long time to get through.
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. 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. 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. ''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 guide
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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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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