Middlesex: A Novel
by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Book Reviews of Middlesex: A Novel
Book Review: A Spectacular Read
Summary: 5 Stars
Middlesex
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Picador Publishing Company
Review by Gary Starks
Not many people know what life is like as a hermaphrodite, but Jeffrey Eugenides puts the reader in the front seat riding shotgun with Cal Stephanides. Middlesex is the brow raising story of Calliope/Cal and of how a family of secrets would change her/his life even before she/he is born.
From the very first lines of Middlesex, Cal, instantly lays out the format for his story without giving away the whole book. "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." In fact, this is such a strong beginning it made me fall in love with the book right away.
Cal follows the above statement with, "My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license records my name as Cal.", gives us an idea of where the author is going with his tale. You will find Cal's story of his rollercoaster life as a young girl going through puberty full of wonder and excitement as well as tragedy.
Once Cal has explained his birth, he takes us across the seas to the place where his yia yia and papu were born; on the slopes of Mount Olympus in a small village in Greece. Here, you will find Desdemona and Lefty Stephanides hoping to marry someone from the village, but their search and frustration will lead them to other adventures.
Travel through time from 1922 through 2001 as Calliope and Cal Stephanides. Travel as one of many fires on the slopes of Mount Olympus down the streets and through houses in a small village in Asia Minor. Travel the Silk Road. Travel across the seas as Desdemona and Lefty escape certain death and to come to America. Travel across the United States as young Cal tries to find himself. Travel the air ride in one Milton's many Catalacs and travel through generations of atrocities as a mutated gene on a fifth chromosome.
Cal tells us of his very unique experience first as a girl struggling through the pubescent and formative years. Waiting to become a lady, Calliope finds everyone else developing while she slowly changes in different ways than the other girls. The budding of breasts and the development of hair (in massive amounts on Calliope's head) set the other girls apart from her. "'Most spectacular of all, girls are becoming women. Not mentally or emotionally even, but physically... Only Calliope in the second row now is motionless... so that she is the only one who takes in the metamorphosis around her. "'Remember me?' she says, to nature. `I'm waiting. I'm still here.'" These beautifully written words are believable as that of a fourteen year old girl wanting to fit in with her classmates, especially in an all girls school where all you know is how your body is suppose to be changing. Then Calliope cuts her hair and her name and runs away to California to escape genital reconfiguration claiming "'I am a boy.'"
While reading Middlesex, I found this story about a hermaphrodite coming of age to be very enjoyable. The narrator takes you on a journey through time and explains each aspect of her/his life as it happens. I truly believe Middlesex will be Mr. Eugenides' next Pulitzer.
Book Review: An excellent book
Summary: 5 Stars
Jeffery Eugenides' Middlesex is a wonderfully invigorating thrill ride. If you enjoy reading about richly described characters who grow as the novel flows, this book is most definetley for you. The story follows the lives and relationships of the family of Calliope Stephanides, a hermaphordite. Calliope must uncover a deep family secret in order to discover the origin of her deformity. The reader of this story follows Calliope's family history, her short-lived relationships, and eventual self-discovery. The novel has several endearing characters, such as Calliope's elder brother known throughout the story as Chapter Eleven and her Father, Milton Stephanides.Chapter eleven is a free style hippie who is a direct contrast to his father, a completely straight forward military man who only plays by the rules. Not only will the reader of Middlesex walk away with an extreme sense of satisfaction, but they'll walk away with quite a bit of knowledge as well.Eugenides uses several incidents from American history to string his story along. The Detroit Riots of the late Sixties which are described with vivid detail. From this the reader learns about American Poverty and violence in history. Eugenides' book also discusses the role of Henry Ford's Americanizing, anti-immigrant melting pot. This is an important part of the story because it details the transformation of Calliope's grandfather Lefty into a full fledged American at the cost of his Greek culture. Henry Ford would do this in reality in order to welcome immagrants into American society. However, as soon as the ceremony was over, he would always ironically find something wrong with their past individual history and would fire them and hire new immigrants. This would create a wave of English speakers who were eligible to work.
Eugenides' characters are Greek, and to tell their story, he uses several parables from classical Greek Mythology to enhance his storytelling. One such example is the Greek play "The Minotaur." By explaining the unnatural relationship by which the minotaur was created, the story of Calliope's deformity is explained and becomes a metaphor for his whole life. Classic Greek mythology explains a hemaphrodite's creation by uniting the characters, Hermes, the messenger god who is also known as Mercury, and Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. These two examples make Eugenides' story more believable, authentic, and his characters more like real people who don't want to lose their cultural identity.
But on the whole, identity is what Middlesex is all about. Throughout the story, the main character struggles with his cultural and sexual identity. Desdemona, Calliope's grandmother, changes her identity to that of a obedient Muslim woman in order to work and help her family. She becomes confused in this when she listens in on a speech by a manipulative Reverend Fard, who says that white people are the Satanic and that they are all going to hell. But when she meets Fard and realizes that is is just a misconstrued soul who has lost his identity, she gains hers back and discovers that her identity as a Greek is more important to her than anything else in her life.
To sum up, Middlesex impresses the reader with many strong themes. The reader learns that no matter what, no one can ever change who he/she is on the inside. Self discovery and a little humor are both used to make the reading fun and entertaining.
Book Review: Fiction truer than Fact
Summary: 5 Stars
Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" explores the mystery of gender in this sprawling family epic about, yes, a hemaphrodite. Don't be put off by the seeming oddness of the subject matter--this is a beautifully written story of a family and a very sensitive exploration of what it really means to be a man or a woman.In this novel, the discovery of a grandparent's long-buried secret unlocks the key to the person Cal/Callie is and prompts the writing of the Stephanides story as Cal/Callie imagines it must have been. Eugenides is a fine writer and I knew by the middle of the second page that I was hooked.
The tale spans the 20th century, starting in post WWI Greece and the constant war between the Greeks and Turks. The story of Desdemona and Lefty's escape to the new world is gripping and suspenseful, and the relationship between them is totally believable. Forward to Detroit at the dawn of the age of the motorcar--we think of Ford and his assembly line as a magnificent innovation, but until now I'd never paused to consider the terrible price paid by the workers in the age before labor laws and safety standards, as well as by Detroit itself before anyone even thought about a thing called the "environment." As the story of this Greek American family unfolds the author takes us on some interesting detours, as many young novelists seem to do these days, to the world of bootlegging and illegal bars, the Detroit race riots, the Greek Orthodox church, the growth of fast food chains, and the earliest rumblings of Black Power.
It's a credit to the author that Cal/Callie remains the focus of all this, a thoughtful, confused teenager having no idea that anything was wrong but knowing somehow that nothing was right. The relationship between Callie and the "Object" was as sensitive a picture of teenage sexual exploration as I've read. And the suspense of waiting for Callie to discover her true nature made it hard to put the book down.
This book reminded me of "As Nature Made Him," a non-fiction account of a child with very similar gender identity issues, who went through the surgery to make him an anatomically correct girl but still couldn't suppress his true gender. And yet I was struck how "Middlesex" presented what I think is a much truer picture of the inner thoughts of an adolescent dealing with puberty in this utterly confusing situation. I loved how Eugenides portrayed Cal/Callie as a blend of the feminine and masculine, as we all are--in this case the blend was just so much closer to 50-50.
Physicians specializing in the gender field come in for some tough criticism in both "Middlesex" and "As Nature Made Him." In both cases the thinking of the time on the nature-nuture question gave more weight to the nuture part of the equation than medicine does today. Unfortunately the physicians here seemed to be as interested in validating their theories as in deciding the right path for the child. The theory may have changed, and one certainly hopes the way Callie was treated, as an interesting specimen, isn't the case today either.
"Middlesex" won a well-deserved Pulitzer. I'm interested in taking a look at Eugenidesa'prior novel, "The Virgin Suicides" and will eagerly await his next.
Book Review: Gee, maybe I shouldn't have married my sister after all
Summary: 5 Stars
"Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that these two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup?"
Who better to ask this rhetorical question than Calliope "Cal" Stephanides, the protagonist of MIDDLESEX? Cal, who's the genetically challenged offspring derived from two generations of inbreeding. His paternal grandparents were brother and sister; his parents were second cousins. And Cal, genetically a male (XY), is thus stricken with an autosomal recessive condition, 5-Alpha-Reductase Deficiency (5-ARD), which prevented in utero development of his male genitalia and left him superficially resembling a female in that area, but without the capacity to bear children.
MIDDLESEX, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is a charming and thoroughly engaging novel in four parts. First, Cal describes his grandparents' (Desdemona and Eleutherios) emigration from the Greek city of Smyrna (present day Izmir) in 1922 after it was overrun by the Turks, their marriage aboard ship on the way to New York, and, in part two, the courtship and marriage of his parents (Theodora and Milton) in Detroit in 1946. Then, in parts three and four, his upbringing as a girl and, finally, his life after the diagnosis of his condition at age fourteen and his subsequent agonizing decision to run away and live as a boy. Cal narrates all of this from the present, a forty-one year old man working for the U.S. State Department and stationed in Berlin.
I've only two niggling criticisms to make about an otherwise extraordinary story. First, since Eugenides is apparently of Greek heritage, and his story is about a Greek family, it isn't surprising that he should incorporate into the plot the Turkish capture of Smyrna in 1922, during which the victors engaged in an appalling orgy of looting, rape, and slaughter. But, since the event was so minor a part in the novel as a whole, the opportunity to take a slap at the hated Turks seems almost gratuitous. Finally, the author goes to great pains to describe 5-ARD as caused by a genetic mutation on chromosome 5. Perhaps he hasn't seen the following, taken directly from a medical journal article on the Web:
"Two genes coding for 5-alpha-reductase have been identified, each for a slightly different isoenzyme. The gene for 5-alpha-reductase type 1 has been determined to be on chromosome 5 ... Linkage analysis has demonstrated that the type 1 enzyme is unrelated to the clinical syndrome of 5-ARD. The other isoenzyme, 5-alpha reductase type 2, determined on CHROMOSOME 2 (emphasis mine), correlates with clinical symptoms."
I haven't been left feeling so good about a book since CORELLI'S MANDOLIN. MIDDLESEX is alternately humorous, poignant, and tragic - just like Life itself. There are times when the author's story verges on brilliance, as when he describes what is certainly a most unusual seduction technique, one which Milton works on Theodora. I should've taken up the clarinet before reaching puberty!
Book Review: A Resounding Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
When I first heard about Middlesex on NPR, I was intrigued. Yet, like many intriguing things, it soon became buried beneath the daily worries of making lunches, writing thank-you cards, and research papers. It was only last month that, with the help of my English teacher's open reading assignment, I remembered Middlesex. Thank God I did!Middlesex is, simply, a beautiful book. The story itself is fascinating: a girl who discovers as a teenager that she is a hermaphrodite and chooses to become a man. The detail is extraordinary - silkworms appear throughout the novel as a leading and touching symbol. The background is amazing: in fact, much of the first half of the book concerns Cal/Callie's parents and grandparents. As Cal himself says, "I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival." It is only in the second half that Cal him/herself comes into a major role. Yet, throughout the book, Cal is definitely the narrator, from his grandparents' flight from Turkey to his own dates with Julie in modern post-September 11 Berlin.
Yet, what makes Middlesex unique is Jeffrey Eugenides' writing. He treats a complicated subject with a finesse and sheer beauty which is rarely encountered. "Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olymps, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped...how it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother's own midwestern womb. Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic, too." Seamlessly, he alternates between lyrical philosophical passages and conversations between two teenage girls. Past and present and future are all fluid and one doesn't even notice it until afterwards.
Well, I said I read Middlesex for my English class and so I did. Two people read the novel with me. One, like me, fell totally in love with it. The other, who loves zombie movies and guts and gore, hated it. His main complaint was that there was too much of a focus on sex. Yet, although that is on the surface the subject of the book, it's really not at all. It's about a person's search for their own identity. The characters are all essentially human - to not empathize with them would take a skill I simply lack. Callie is touching and absorbing - her search to find herself and define who she is and why she's here, is one which confronts everybody. "Was it love or reproduction? Chance or destiny?" Callie, like all of us, struggles to explain the meaning of her existence.
For those of you who adore "Night of the Living Dead" and "2 Fast 2 Furious" more than life itself, Middlesex is not for you. But...on second thought, I take it back. Read it anyway. You'll like it or not, but I'll bet you'll be pleasantly surprised.