Middlesex

I ended up not connecting with this book as much as I expected to. I'm not sure if I just wasn't in the mood for it, but I found the multi-generational slice-of-life storytelling to be a bit of a drag and I was never too endeared with any of the characters. I found myself searching for themes to connect disparate parts of the story together and often came up empty.

However, Eugenides is a gifted wordsmith (and Kristoffer Tabori does great work bringing the words to life in the audiobook) and so I still enjoyed much of my time reading this.

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.

4.1

I started to read Middlesex after finishing Eugenides' first novel, The Virgin Suicides, and had the high expectations of the same atmospheric well-written coming-of-age tale.

While Middlesex is a fiction novel, it actually feels more like I'm reading a historical memoir. It reminds me somehow of Forrest Gump. JE places its characters in between historical events, whether it be Turkey, Greece, New York City, Detroit, etc.

I gotta say that I truly enjoyed reading this book, although it's a hefty read (500+ pages). It took me 4 days to finish it, but still. Middlesex is a very ~intellectual~ book. It traces the story of how Calliope, or Cal, turned out to be a hermaphrodite - due to genetics and decisions made by Cal's ancestors before she was born. Outside the hermaphrodite angle, it was easy for me to get involved in Calliope's family history. I was shocked by the atrocities of the war committed during her grandparents' days in Greece. I sympathized with Calliope as she went through those awkward adolescent years, never truly fitting with anyone and getting confused with romantic feelings for her former girl best friend. The climax of the story took place when she finds out how different she truly is, finding about her ~real~ sex, and how Cal has decided to lead his/her life.

Although it was entertaining, it felt like it could have been edited/written better. There were a lot characters not necessary to the story. There were times when JE was describing a situation way too fondly, or putting on beautiful words on emotions and details as much as possible that it started to become a distraction. There were times when I had to skim through parts because of paragraphs that are almost a page long.

Despite the aforementioned portions, Middlesex is a very informative read that I found enlighting in so many ways. I'm glad that I've read this but it's probably something I'll never explore or read twice. But this is still a must-read, and I'd totally recommend it.

I felt like a voyeur while reading this
story of a Greek-American hermaphrodite.
For me, the whole book felt puffed up
and the story never came together.
I kept waiting for the big epiphany that
never came.

I liked it a lot.
It got a bit boring at the teenages, but all in all, it was a very warm and loving story. It felt like an autobiography. I kept forgetting it wasn't :-D Now, of course, I can't say what the reality of being intersexed is, so maybe I'm wrong, but to me it felt like someone telling their own story.
The ending was very nice.
I heartily recommend this book. It was interesting, had enough of magical realism, history, funny bits, and emotions, to make it a good read.

Like the narrator this masterpiece is neither one thing nor another. An epic Greek tale and/or a modern American novel. I didn't know what to expect from this, looking solely for a Pulitzer prize winner to read I was intrigued by the cover. In retrospect the clues were all there in the hyphenated title and the classical illustration but I really did not expect what I found.
No spoilers here but the big reveal comes in the first sentence and Eugenides had me hooked from then. Cal's story crosses oceans and generations, brushing with revolutions and revolutionaries. It is full of history and knowledge and science and poetry - worthier poeple than me will have reviewed it with much better words. Deserving of prizes and praise it's a tale of acceptance of self and others and I loved it.

More of an epic than I expected, the novel doesn't get to the real gender issues until late in the book. But by then the reader ought to be eager to hear about it. Still, the weighty topic was dealt with maybe too lightly. A key and defining moment in the book comes off more as a whim than anything significant.

Excellent exploration of the life of the main character and his/her coming to terms with being a hermaphrodite. The gender relations are obviously the main attraction, and are well done, but so are the family relations and the historical backdrop.

The theme of standing in the middle between two apparently distinct poles is revisited throughout. The most interesting for me was the position of the Greek immigrant (or 2nd generation) in the middle of racially-divided and explosive Detroit. Really well done without beating the reader over the head with metaphor.

Also happens to contain the best and most accurate descriptions of northern Michigan in the summer that I've read.