by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Product Description
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal."
So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny 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 Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
Amazon.com
"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
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Too much with too little., 2008-07-06
Eugenides attempts to make too much of too little plot and he shrouds this shortcoming in lengthy (and sometimes impressive) research ability. The Desdemona/Lefty backstory, while interesting, is not at all important to the purpose or direction of the novel and this reader feels as if the entire opening 200 pages could have been dropped to make this a much better read. As much as Euginedes feels like he needs to write a very lengthy, epic novel, he does not succeed but for the fact that he won a pulitzer as a result of such a poor year for fiction. The book is not terrible on the whole but it is not entirely engaging as popular belief would suggest.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Why won't this book go away?, 2008-07-05
I can't believe this book is a book club selection for my library. It's a long boring rambling ridiculous story that I attemped to read 2 years ago and could not even finish. Why does it still keep popping up?? I think its fame alone is keeping it famous, though its actual content is not worthy. I guess it has become a fashion item, with the momentum of any arbitrary, mindless fashion trend. Let's break this trend and stop making our kids read this thing! There are better books to read.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 A touching Novel, 2008-07-04
A fine novel with assimilation of immigrants (When they still did that) Family problems and a lead character which has the problem of being a hermaphrodite. It may sound silly but the whole story is loaded with Soul. Having grown up in Detroit on the East side it was all understanding to me with Indian Village, Grosse Pointe, and all of Detroit featured as background. It seems to a point like every familys story with a little more thrown in. I highly recommend this book. You will not waste your time reading it.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Pretty good but flawed, 2008-07-04
I enjoy reading this novel, but it would be a lot better told from a different (consistent) perspective. The mingling of 1st person narrative with an omniscient narrator jars me from my belief in the story. Also the characterization is pretty loose and 2D. These are not very convincing people - they're more like minor characters on television. For a much better book with some similarities in the story line (immigrant families, race mingling in the lower classes, a period covering the early to the late 20th century)I recommend I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb, which is an amazing book and far superior to this one, which is more dependent on its gimmicky hero/heroine and basically just a fun read at best.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
What's all the hype about?, 2008-07-03
I expected so much from this book! People at my book club RAVED about it. I trudged through it, expecting it to get better, and it finally did--in the last quarter of the book. Why did I have to trudge through 350 pages of Greek history to get to the meat of the book? I don't get it, and I certainly don't get what makes this book Pulitzer-worthy.
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