Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jeffrey EugenidesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2002-06-05
ISBN: 0312427735
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: Failed to deliver
Summary: 2 Stars
The book is somewhat entertaining, but the description of the book is misleading. I was under the impression that I would be reading the story of Cal, a girl/boy dealing with gender identity issues due to a rare gene mutation. Instead, I found myself reading the story of Cal's grandparents, their journey from Europe to America, the story of Cal's parents and their life in Detroit. This might not be so bad if the family saga were interesting, but as it stands, I felt as if I were taking a peek into the lives of some pretty boring people. The fact that there is so much incest involved in the family history doesn't actually add any spice to the story and just serves as an explanation as to how the gene got passed along. The main character's story is hard to follow; as the narrator, he will delight the reader with a bit of his life before turning back in time to tell the story of his family. I wish the author would've spent more time on the main character's life and exploring how this rare gene mutation affected him, but unfortunately this engaging story was thrown into the back-burner.
Although the story is well-written and the subject matter fascinating, it was slow moving and just didn't deliver.
Summary of Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
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
Eugenides, Jeffrey Books
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