Middlesex
Ratings310
Average rating4.1
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.
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.
I found myself wanting a little more exploration of this intersex/gender identity nearing the end. realized on its last pages that gender identity is only a small section of a life. Considering the book was very long, it just doesn't make sense how much time we spent with the grandparents. (not that i didn't enjoy it!) I'm torn because the book doesn't pride itself (blurb wise) on being solely about the gender identity of Cal, but everything is riding on this one detail. I almost felt guilty wanting a bit more (I mean how much can you really talk about your genitals?) but I think what's obvious here is the physical barrier of the author. I think authors can take on identities to create characters (ex. white author writes black character into story) but it feels a bit inauthentic to, quite literally, take on Cal's identity (imagine that same white author writing a story about the black experience?) being...not intersex. I think Eugenides tackled it. The medical aspect and the relationships were throughly explored. It's the mental I thought was being hid from us. What Cal felt had very little airtime, in my opinion. And what airtime it did have, felt surface level or at the very least, predictable. I guess I'm just the kind of reader who can't separate the writer from the work. If I'd gone into it blind, maybe I'd think different.
Apart from that, the prose is great! I mean it won a pulitzer.
After probably a decade of this paperback sitting on my bookshelf, moving around from home to home with me, I've finally read the Modern Classic™, Middlesex.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book, but overall, I found the intricately woven style of the story so compelling. The first half of the book was my favorite. I loved reading about Cal's family history; Desdemona and Lefty (Cal's grandparents) were such interesting, vibrant characters, and tbh if the entire book had been about them I wouldn't have been mad. I enjoyed everything about their story—their love of their hometown, their journey from Greece to America, navigating their new home as immigrants, and crafting a history where they could safely be together.
My hesitations about this book revolve around Cal's experience with being intersex. From what I've read, Eugenides is not intersex, and did not speak to a single intersex person about their experiences before or during the writing process. I'm sure he did his own research, but to write an intimate account of a life you have no personal experience with, I really think the only way to truly do it justice is to talk with people who do have that personal experience. Since only about the last 1/4 of the book really focused on Cal's intersex identity, I wasn't overwhelmingly bothered by this, but there were definitely times when I felt Cal's story could've used a little more nuance and authenticity. The vague mentions of Cal's gender journey worked well as a thread to tie all the different stories together throughout, but the ending of the book, which really attempted to focus on Cal as an intersex person, felt shoehorned in, and thus the ending fell flat for me.
I don't typically need or use half stars, but I think this one has to be 3.5 stars for me. I loved a lot of this book, liked a lot of this book, and was also disappointed by a few things, and unfortunately those things (specifically, LGBTQIAP representation) are really important to me. I don't think Eugenides did a poor job by any means, I just think with a bit more effort, he could have done better.
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.
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.
Started reading for a class, finished too late for the class but the book was very good. Really drew you in and made you want to find out the entire story of Calliope (Cal). Great writing.
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.
Really impressive read. Great sense of time and place (Greece, Detroit). Great handling of really complicated gender issues without reading like a gender studies textbook. Great characters.
For years, I have avoided Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. The concept felt too much like a ploy to me. It didn't matter that it won the Pulitzer, or that it had such rave reviews, or that it was on Oprah's Book List (admittedly, I tend to love “her” books). I couldn't succumb to its pull.
At the insistence of my MFA mentor, I finally did. Wow, what a surprise. A fabulous read and not at all what I expected. There were times when my love for the novel wavered (e.g. the sudden disappearance of Desmonda who was such an integral part of the story), but Eugenides successfully pulled these loose threads together one by one to make a wonderful piece of fiction.
A little off-putting at first - but if you can get past the idea that the main character's grandparents were brother and sister, you're in for a great read. The author really captures adolescent girlhood in all its turmoil and glory.
An artfully portrayed, character driven novel that deals with the topic matter of intersex conditions respectfully, but without kid gloves.
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.
