...
Finally we begin to meet the young Callie herself, and grow with her as she enjoys the tranquillity and comfort of the rambling house, Middlesex, and the relative excitement of her new girls’ school and exotic and attractive friends…
**********************************************************************************************************
This ... Read review
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lefty and Desdemona must flee the Turks who ... more
are invading their crumbling city in the Ottoman Empire, and decide to head for America. What this unusual brother and sister do not realise is that a rare genet...
Postage & Packaging: refer to website Availability: in stock
Middlesex is a significantly more ambitious and much odder novel than Jeffrey Eugenides' ... more
resonant debut, The Virgin Suicides (on DVD), which was a bittersweet paean to adolescent love. This is a sprawling family saga, bursting with life, which spans th...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lefty and Desdemona must flee the Turks who ... more
are invading their crumbling city in the Ottoman Empire, and decide to head for America. What this unusual brother and sister do not realise is that a rare genetic mutation is following them. It secretly travels with them first to Detroit, and then to suburbia, through prohibition and the race riots of 1967. And in the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that develops between them leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls.
Postage & Packaging:refer to website Availability:in stock
A story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides ... more
family who travel from a 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 Point, Michigan.
Advantages: A huge great thing that is held aloft by a single voice Disadvantages: I suspect Jeffrey didn't realise how we UKers would just think of that rather humdrum place Middlesex
...narrative text.
Middlesex is about how others see you, it is about our need to “fit in” and be normal in a society that keeps on moving those darned normalcy goalposts anyway. Why should it matter SO MUCH if Cal has female and male genitalia? Why must a man slave to make money to gain any respect within society? Why did race ever affect our communal worldview so thoroughly and how does the “alien” ever successfully integrate into a ... ...Middlesex is undoubtedly more than the obvious jars, the immediate landmarks – it is also a looping yarn that confidently lays out the nature vs. nurture question with alacrity. Cal is a product of her genes, she is a mix of interbreeding and no egg ever barred the way of its brother’s sperm: no sperm ever slowed its swimming to stop the inevitable for her… Callie is a product of her family’s transatlantic adventures and no girl’s school, or bows ... more
“Some people inherit houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. Still others get a Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.”
Calliope, Callie, Cal.
Meet our narrator, our single all-knowing, all-seeing narrator who is variously a little girl named Callie, who is as pretty as a button and looking forward to the excitement of adolescence and all it has to offer - and yet who is also a 14 year old boy. Alone, scared and insecure, a boy who has just come to understand something about those “family jewels” that s/he has inherited and carries between his legs.
Callie will carry her reader on a journey that starts with her grandmother Desdemona and brother Lofty who have grown up in rural Bithynios in Asia-Minor where their feelings for each other explode just as the village is to explode more literally around them and force them to run to Smyrna. In Smyrna they will incredibly, successfully escape the Turkish rule of 1922 and it is on board the relative safety of a ship taking them to a new life in the US that somehow or other they take each other’s hand in marriage…
Through the race riots of Detroit and the birth of the Nation of Islam, through Prohibition and liquor-running and through the boom of Motor City and the birth of their two healthy children Tessie and Zoe, Desdemona will never truly be able to live a comfortable existence knowing the dark secret that she and her husband/brother keep.
Yet when the following generation come along, the two children Chapter Eleven and Calliope are given a full bill of health and for a while Desdemona’s secret worries seem to have been over nothing….
Finally we begin to meet the young Callie herself, and grow with her as she enjoys the tranquillity and comfort of the rambling house, Middlesex, and the relative excitement of her new girls’ school and exotic and attractive friends…
This novel is an amazing mixture of a “coming of age” work with a cruel and difficult twist, intertwined with a family saga that spans three generations and several continents yet stays true to its “Greek tragedy” roots. Yet much of what holds the fabric of the work together is the tantalisingly familiar and pertinent voice of s/he who will narrate much of her own family history in an adult voice long before s/he has even been born in the narrative text.
Middlesex is about how others see you, it is about our need to “fit in” and be normal in a society that keeps on moving those darned normalcy goalposts anyway. Why should it matter SO MUCH if Cal has female and male genitalia? Why must a man slave to make money to gain any respect within society? Why did race ever affect our communal worldview so thoroughly and how does the “alien” ever successfully integrate into a new society without compromise or conflict?
Yet Middlesex is undoubtedly more than the obvious jars, the immediate landmarks – it is also a looping yarn that confidently lays out the nature vs. nurture question with alacrity. Cal is a product of her genes, she is a mix of interbreeding and no egg ever barred the way of its brother’s sperm: no sperm ever slowed its swimming to stop the inevitable for her… Callie is a product of her family’s transatlantic adventures and no girl’s school, or bows in her hair, or trinkets and truffles can belie her true nature.
Grandmother Desdemona decides that she would like to die soon after the sad demise of her “husband” Lofty, so she takes to her bed and awaits the inevitable. The inconvenience to her that she is as healthy as an ox is another small triumph for the reader who will collect up all reading memories of the family history and store them in that bedridden body thus:
“Everything about Middlesex spoke of forgetting and everything about Desdemona made plain the inescapability of remembering.”
So we have social realism in all its mutating glory meeting myth and legend and superstition…in all its old-Greek-lady-waiting-to-die glory. Perhaps there is a case of hope over biology, of love over genetics and sheer force of will over biodiversity. Or perhaps life is just a bit more complicated than that and in truth there will always be a place for the hard cold facts alongside the warmest of hopes and desires.
For all her allegory the aging Desdemona makes for a funny, daft and hugely enjoyable part of the work – and humour forms a very large part of this journey of ours. Let me give you a tiny insight:
““Why don’t you go back to your own country?” one of them shouted. “This is my country,” Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached behind the counter and produced a pistol.”
A night out at the theatre that gets everyone hot under the collar, the John-Lennonesque transformation of the geeky elder brother into the deeply spaced out child of the 60’s virtually overnight…even the unfortunate end of Cal’s own father who has anything BUT the traditional “life flashing before me” thoughts as his imminent death heads straight for him.
All these formative moments, these important landmarks in a lifetime are treated with a smile, a laugh and a joke. Characters are flawed, they make mistakes and sometimes they look plain daft. They are human, and quite often in the course of this novel we will laugh at their failings because we see something of our own shortcomings in them.
The only thing that makes Middlesex a novel that should be read is the writing. Yes of course the family history, in all it’s complexity is worthy of a big pat on the back to Eugenides – not least because it took no less than 9 years to weave together. Yes, it is also true that the consideration of the pseudo-hermaphroditism in Cal is handled admirably – being medically clear (and educating) without falling into a patronising tone. Yes, yes it is also true to say that the voice of Cal will ring in my ears for a long time to come – a believable and inspiring narratorial voice who can narrate from before their own conception without losing credibility is an act of bravery and no small skill, and is alone deserving of the doffiest of doffed caps.
Yet these things are clever – that doesn’t mean they are going to make great fiction.
What DOES make great fiction is the ringing clear choice of words, of sentence structure and of tone: and the lyrical and entrancing movement of the story. Only the deftest of touch and most confident of penmanship could ensure that the sheer enormity and generosity of spirit and love of life that fills every page can pour itself into the hearts and minds of the reader. Let me give you a tiny example, it is a moment when a minor character called Doctor Philobosian knows it is time to leave the burning Smyrna:
“The smell of things burning that aren’t meant to burn waft across the city: shoe polish, rat poison, toothpaste, piano strings, hernia trusses, baby cribs, Indian clubs. And hair and skin.”
Stingingly truthful, concise, sharp, full of bathos and of compassion: all this in just one sentence of a novel spanning 500+ pages…
********************************************************************************************************** All human life is here…funny in parts, always insightful, honest and original: nobody can fail to adore the young Callie as she takes the unlikely role of everyman, dresses down the American dream and fumbles it back together again. Eugenides has done here what all authors aspire to: to make the universal truths stand in the shoes of the individual.
This is fundamentally a big-hearted offering, a sympathetic world view, a warm and soulful voice that speaks to every teenager who has ever wondered if they are REALLY part of *this* family…to every member of a minority race who is just trying to fit in…and to anyone who has caught sight of the cold winds sneaking inside the duffel coats of those who stand just outside the “accepted” boundaries of society.
Jeffrey Eugenides won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this hugely anticipated second novel. The Bloomsbury 2002 paperback edition has a cover price of £7.99 but is available from many sources at discounted prices - use the ISBN number 0-7475-6162-1. His first novel, “The Virgin Suicides” has gained a cult following and is now far more read than it was on first publication, and the subject of a successful film by the same name.
Advantages: An excellently written family saga, fascinating subject matter and lovely characters Disadvantages: Not what I was expecting, too much time setting the scene
Middlesex is the second book by Jefferey Eugenides, whose praises I have recently been singing in my review of his other book, The Virgin Suicides. Having enjoyed his first book so much, I was instantly attracted to reading his other work, and although I was not disappointed by it, I was very surprised, as it was far from what I was expecting. Whereas The Virgin Suicides is a relatively short book in which nothing much happens and the majority of ... ...a short space of time, Middlesex is a tale of epic proportions, which traces a family’s history over a period of more than 50 years.
Our narrator was born Calliope Stephanides in the early 1960s. She lived her early life as a girl, but when an accident brought her to a hospital emergency room at the age of 14, it was discovered that Calliope was in fact male, a fact which went unnoticed at the time of her birth due to her status as a pseudo-hermaphrodite ...
Pumpkin 03.03.2004
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Advantages: well researched, well written Disadvantages: none
...by Jeffrey Eugenides. Middlesex follows three generations of the Stephanides family, from the grandparents driven out of Asia Minor Greece to the grandchildren in Modern day America, and principally Calliope, our narrator. I'm not often a fan of those novels which drag things out over so many years of a family, sometimes it seems a trite formula where gaps and holes can creep in, but not so here. Calliope sums up on the first page of the book all ... ...twice, once as a baby girl, and again as a teenage boy. This cryptic summary is like a pebble dropped into still water, and the rest of the book is the concentric rippled rings pulsing outwards, growing ever bigger as the story unfolds and gives the reader the means to piece together the truth with each new scrap of information or sudden flash back. Each revelation left me wide eyed as suddenly a new chunk of the story fell into place.
I would have ...
melee679 18.10.2003
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Advantages: Historically educational, beautiful story Disadvantages: Some of the detail might put off the squeamish...
Well, what have we here; a book all about Uxbridge? Hmm, maybe Brunel University will make an app...
No, of course not. The title refers to the narrator's position as a hermaphrodite - in the middle of the sexes. If nothing else, this book explains the difference between gender and sex, which my pernickety English-student background finds comforting.
The narrator - known as Calliope (later just Cal) - is Greek, and introduces his adult self before ... ...life immediately, however, we are taken back in time to her grandparents - who hold a guilty secret - escaping from the re-invading Turkish army. Broad swathes are painted through the wider context here - Greek and Turkish mutual dislike, historical reasons for their claim to the same land - with the focus placed firmly on Lefty and Desdemona's courtship and eventual escape. The individual tragedies that accompany war are emblemised in the fate of ...
jbrebel 09.12.2003
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Advantages: Teases you throughout the whole story, some great images created. Disadvantages: Two much historical information, not so interesting!
Really enjoyed the book but found the huge amount of historical information a bit boring, wanted the book to get on with the story about the 'main' character. Thought that the main character could have been explored a lot more. The brother was given a name that I thought put his character down and his character seemed to be so much more than that. I thought the decrptions of the house 'Middlesex' was really good and I loved the character of Desdemona. ... ...bit far fetched, especially when he turns up for the second time. This book would be excellent if you know anyone who is Greek, American or likes Greek tragedies at all. The main character isn't truelly intersexual though, and doesn't play a convincing intersexual character. It would have been more convincing if Cal was more ambigous in his sexuality in the end. But Cal seems to be a straight bloke though te whole thing, even if he looks and feels ...
beckytebbett 18.02.2005
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Advantages: Well crafted, well written, a brilliant book. Disadvantages: None.
I really hope that everyone at some point in their lives encounters this book. By the time I'd finished I'd learnt about genetics, hermaphrodites, Detroit, the Nation of Islam, American immigrant experience, and some history of the Greek and Turkish struggles in Asia Minor. The backdrops to the novel are diverse to say the least . But this is not a historical novel, or one that gets swallowed up in trying to show how much research the author has ... ...as well as the effects our forebears' past decisions can have on our personal present. The characters are well thought out and honestly portrayed, particularly Cal, who is the "middlesex" of the title, born with both genders. She is at first brought up a girl, but over the years diverts from the life that has been chosen for her. All the other stories and people at some point can be traced to her.
After reading The Virgin Suicides, which I loved, ...
charlytune 11.12.2006
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Would you read it again?
Story
Characters
Readability
How does it compare to ...
How does it compare to ...
Similar reviews »
Reviews which might be of interest for "Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides"
Advantages: Sense of mystery keeps you reading, not too long at 350 pages Disadvantages: disjointed story, slow moving, characters slow to grow on you
character I hate quite so much, except maybe Nurse Rachet in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Evil cow!
I also disliked the way the book jumped around so very much. It felt disjointed to me and I hate to say it but it would have worked a lot better on screen than in a book. If you've seen the film Momento then you can imgaine what this book is like.
I felt that the book could have been slimmed down a lot without loosing the vital information of the story, there felt like too many sub lines and back history on the family that simply had no bearing on the main story other than to give a sense of cyclicity to the story sort of like DH Lawrences The Rainbow or JeffreyEugenidesMiddlesex.
I would recommend this book but I agree with the other reviewer who notes that it may take 2 readings to truly understand it, I will be putting it down ...
Advantages: Wonderfully well written, compelling, magical... Disadvantages: Melancholy, haunting, tragic..
page ? can you see why I found it hard to put down?
*******************************************************************************************************
JeffreyEugenides has written this novel and also ?Middlesex?, which is an equally impressive piece of writing. This novel is available for a cover price of £6.99 but bargains abound on the net. Use the ISBN number 0-7475-6059-5 or look for the fabulously apt photo by William Webb of a pair of slim pigeon-toed legs in the grass that has been used as the front cover for the 2002 Bloomsbury paperback. ...
