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MIDDLESEX

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Cover Summary

‘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 1974.’

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 1967 before moving 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.

Reading Middlesex

I swear on God I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked this one up. I’d seen one photo of one page from this book on someone’s Instagram and instantly loved the writing. I had no clue what it was even about, I got it anyway.

So Middlesex, ever so cleverly titled, is about Calliope, a third generation of Greek immigrants with something very special indeed – she’s a hermaphrodite, meaning her body includes both sexes. She was born and raised as a girl, only to decide she really was an in-between, a mind matched with a very particular body.

It did take me over a month to read, but that was because other things were happening in my life that left me with very little appetite for sitting down in solitude with a book. This happens sometimes, and it’s okay.

What I loved

The Generations’ story and Greek-ness of it
This tale is epic. It spans over a century from a small town in Greece to modern Detroit and is gorgeously flavoured with Greek traditions, from food to myths to ways of doing things, even to the shapes of noses. I really enjoyed the first two parts of the book where Callie recounts the story of her grandmother and grandpa (also siblings), and then her mum and dad (cousins), and all the history and twists in between. This was absolutely the best part for me, especially all bits concerning Desmonda, her witty, superstitious and extremely dramatic grandma who I one day aspire to be like when I’m free to be as old and irritating to everyone around me as I damn well please.

How Eugenides even got this idea in the first place
How just HOW do you even morph the concept of hermaphrodites into this epic, complex tale that makes all sorts of sense? My respect for this man, is boundless. Either mad or genius.

The writing
The pure cleverness of it, the quick wit, the subliminal dark humour. Like in the Virgin Suicides, Eugenides also treats sexuality and the body delicately, in miniscule detail but never crass. I absolutely love his writing here, he is a master crafter of words.

“It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.”

What I wasn’t too keen about

Cal’s life
As soon as Cal finished the previous two generations’ stories and moved on to her own, I kind of lost interest. For some reason it just didn’t keep me hooked, there was a lot of repetition about her body not changing in line with other girls’ her age and it just lost my interest a little.

The lack of things happening
It’s an epic, obviously nothing grand is going to happen, but I wanted it to. I wanted something big and dramatic to close off the book but that wasn’t the plan for Mr.E. He kept all events along the same frequency of intensity and I got a bit bored by the end.

All in all…

Eughhh split on this one. I’d give the writing by itself a solid five stars, the Greek part of the novel another five, and the part that focuses on Cali a 2 or so. Honestly, this book was gorgeous to start but tiring as hell to finish for me, and I kind of wanted to put it down and never think of it again at several points towards the end. Still, I’m happy I managed to finish it, and I did get some excellent vocabulary out of it for the next time I want to take a jab at my ancestors without sounding like a post-modernist snob face.