A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate 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 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. Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
"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." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:
Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." ... I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Coming of age in 20th century America:
I must have read this book 10 years ago and still think about it. This is a universal coming of age story. It's an immigrant tale. It's boy meets girl. It's a tale of Chicago from the 1950's to the present. It has wonderful sentences. It's ingenious. It's family. It's modern America. (It's also hilarious and made me cry).
Middlesex:
What a book this was! I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the almost two weeks that I spent reading it. Wow! This is one of those books that I had been meaning to read for years, but I never picked it up. Jeffrey Eugenides' book is about a hermaphrodite, but it is also an enthralling family saga. I love that. Cal is one of those characters that I will remember always, along with that quirky Greek-American family: Milt, Tessie, Desdemona, Lefty, Chapter Eleven, Father Mike, Aunt Zo and on and on. I also... more info
accomplishes the near-impossible- turning hermaphroditism into a bestselling topic:
I wouldn't give this book five stars based on my personal preference- the author's style and sense of humor relies too much on a somewhat irritating "cuteness" for my taste. But there's no way I could deny that this is a five star work by virtue of accomplishing something I would have thought impossible- turning a story about a hermaphrodite into an international bestseller. To be sure, Eugenides' acute attention to detail is remarkable, and there's a fair bit of cleverness in the story of the... more info
OK, but not really new.:
The book arrived in good condition but was advertised as new. It was clear from the color of the pages that the book was not brand new.
