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Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)…
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Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (original 2002; edition 2002)

by Jeffrey Eugenides

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
27,199629107 (4.1)939
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.
Member:erica30
Title:Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Authors:Jeffrey Eugenides
Info:Picador (2002), Edition: 1st, Paperback, 544 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
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Work Information

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

  1. 102
    The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (sipthereader, sturlington)
  2. 81
    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!
  3. 81
    Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters (_debbie_)
    _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)
  4. 93
    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.
  5. 82
    A Widow for One Year by John Irving (readerbabe1984)
  6. 51
    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)
  7. 30
    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.
  8. 64
    The Human Stain by Philip Roth (sarah-e)
    sarah-e: A character 'passes' in society - dealing with culture and identity.
  9. 10
    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.
  10. 32
    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.
  11. 10
    Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin (Anonymous user)
  12. 10
    How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz (jacr)
  13. 10
    The Hours by Michael Cunningham (sturlington)
  14. 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.
  15. 00
    Sugarless by James Magruder (amberwitch)
    amberwitch: Similar topic and era
  16. 22
    Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (CGlanovsky)
    CGlanovsky: The destiny of an individual and a family bound up with that of a particular time and place.
  17. 11
    Labor of Love: The Story of One Man's Extraordinary Pregnancy by Thomas Beatie (infiniteletters)
  18. 33
    The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich (ainsleytewce)
    ainsleytewce: Both begin with immigrants who come to America at approximately the same time.
  19. 22
    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.
  20. 01
    Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes by T. Cooper (susanbooks)

(see all 31 recommendations)

AP Lit (203)
Florida (57)
Romans (46)
Teens (5)
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» See also 939 mentions

English (611)  Italian (5)  Spanish (3)  Dutch (2)  Catalan (1)  Norwegian (1)  German (1)  French (1)  Finnish (1)  Swedish (1)  Portuguese (1)  All languages (628)
Showing 1-5 of 611 (next | show all)
Well written, but not my taste.
( )
  mjphillips | Feb 23, 2024 |
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. ( )
  Zedseayou | Jan 30, 2024 |
Enjoyable, though I found it a little slow in places, and the back-history of the hero/ine's family takes up most of the book it seems. I felt like I learned at least as much, probably more, about Greek-American culture than I did about the experience of hermaphrodism. ( )
  breathslow | Jan 27, 2024 |
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. ( )
  sophia.magyk | Jan 3, 2024 |
I can't add much to the perceptive assessments of this book offered by other Goodreads users below, other than to say it earns every word of high praise it has garnered.
  Mark_Feltskog | Dec 23, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 611 (next | show all)
''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.
 

» Add other authors (2 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Eugenides, Jeffreyprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Bagnoli, KatiaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Cholodenko, MarcTraductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Gómez Ibáñez, BenitoTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Larsen, Dag HeyerdahlTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Lindenburg, MiekeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Lindholm, Juhani(KÄÄnt.)secondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Nilsson, Hans-JacobTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Schönfeld, EikeÜbersetzersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Tabori, KristofferNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Torrescasana, AlbertTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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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 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 to this, of course...He was quiet, blinking. There was the usual lag time while he thought.
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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.

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Book description
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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