Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex

Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents' desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s. By the author of The Virgin Suicides.Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.

A Novel

Sometimes I awoke with the feeling that a spotlight had been trained on me while I slept. It was as if my ether body had been conversing with angels, somewhere up near the ceiling. When I opened my eyes they fled. But I could hear the traces of the communication, the fading echoes of the crystal bell. Some essential information was rising from the depths of my being

I could sense the happiness of couples holding first babies and the fortitude of Catholics accepting their ninth. I could feel one young mother’s disappointment at the reappearance of her husband’s weak chin on the face of her newborn daughter, and a new father’s terror as he calculated the tuition for triplets. On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts

Dangling a silver spoon over her daughter-in-law's belly, Desdemona confidently predicts that her next grandchild will be a boy. But a rogue pair of chromosomes, descended from the slopes of Mount Olympus, will survive war, bootleggers and heartbreak to finally unite in Calliope Stephanides - a baby girl who upsets all the odds. Growing up in Michigan, Calliope is the bearer of a family secret that turns her into Cal, the narrator of this intersex, inter-generational epic.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Nature brought no relief. Outside had ended. There was nowhere to go that wouldn't be me.

lots of between-ness making every aspect kind of hard to pin down which is a fun space to exist in, makes you feel topsy-turvy. was not entirely upbeat nor depressing, coming-of-age or generational or both, narrator not born until halfway through the novel—what a clever way to tell a story little mini history! certainly there are paragraphs and prose that will stick with me (see: factory descriptions) but mostly I think the feeling of having Enjoyed This Book is strong and perhaps as nebulous as trying to define any element of it with particularity. 

Jules 

Sehr fesselnde Geschichte, locker geschrieben, zum Teil sehr lustig und dann wieder sehr tiefgründig, habe ich gerne gelesen!

Marlene Renkl

Sarah Sammis

I was interested in Cal's story, especially at that point where he began to realize he wasn't exactly a she and how he grew to adulthood with this knowledge. This book BARELY covers any of that aspect of the story. Instead it is bogged down in the history of Cal's whacky relatives. This novel could have been a tight, interesting, and compelling story of about 200 pages, rather than this cliche filled and bloated 500 page behemoth.

Vicky  Nuñez 

This is the second Pulitzer Prize-winning novel I've ever read and just like the first it quickly became one of my favorite books of all time. Which makes me think maybe I should be reading more Pulitzer books.

Anyway, Middlesex is what all storytelling should be like. It sweeps you away with its beautiful lyrical prose, sometimes been overly verbose, but never for longer than a few paragraphs and it only adds to the story.


  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 Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. 


It is the story of three generations of Greek-American and how their intermarriage culminates with Cal, an intersex person. He narrates the story in the form of a memoir. 


  And so before it's too late I want to get it down for good: this rollercoaster ride of a single gene through time.


It's not a pretty story, it starts in a little village in Turkey, it is mostly developed in Detroit, and it ends somewhere in Germany. It's a family drama filled with incest, and gender identity. 
It starts with Cal's grandparents and slowly reaches a crescendo until Cal is born and she finally learns she's been a he all along. 

Middlesex is an incredible book filled with history of all the places where it takes place and a great story over all. I loved it.

Eugenides’ best work by far, makes Virgin Suicides look like a rough draft and turns Marriage Plot into fan fiction (which, let’s face it, it is). So many capital letters and dense paragraphs I really struggled to get through, looking things up, rereading so very many sentences. The dialogue was neat and genuine. The medical terms expansive and long.

The Eugenides triangle is complete! I am free! Please send me more books to read. :)

Eugenides’ best work by far, makes Virgin Suicides look like a rough draft and turns Marriage Plot into fan fiction (which, let’s face it, it is). So many capital letters and dense paragraphs I really struggled to get through, looking things up, rereading so very many sentences. The dialogue was neat and genuine. The medical terms expansive and long.

The Eugenides triangle is complete! I am free! Please send me more books to read. :)

Eugenides' writing speaks in a lot of ways to the trans and intersex experience in the US but this book is about aging more than anything else. I found myself thinking about my own family, my own childhood while reading and I think its prompted me into some new ways of thinking that I really like. 

Alex 

Francesca Starecheski

I am quite upset by this novel. Jeffrey Eugenides is certainly a gifted author, so much is evident in his ability to unite a single plot across three generations of characters. In reading this book, I was not educated enough on the intersex experience to gauge the accuracy of Eugenides' portrayal. I presumed that the recount of struggles was genuine, for only an intersex or transgender author should write so candidly about their trauma in exploring identity. Not so, unfortunately. Jeffrey is a cisgender male, attempting to reflect an oppression he has never known through entirely separate experiences that felt convenient to him, as redefining cultural identity. The primary reason that this is troubling is that this author did not attempt to amplify the intersex voice in the slightest. He neglected to interview intersex individuals in his research for fear of spoiling his creative vision. 
Furthermore, Eugenides took inspiration from intersex author Herculine Barbin, and altered her portrayal to his own satiation. Though her traumas resulted in her death by suicide, Eugenides described her story as overly dramatized, and claimed that it did not have enough focus on the intersex genitalia. Many of his tropes further intersex stereotyping, and he has ultimately turned society's gaze on an entire community of widely misunderstood individuals towards himself, silencing intersex voices on a grand scale. Authentic intersex titles to be read in the stead of a highly invalidating daydream such as Middlesex would be XOXY by Kimberly Zieselman, Born Both by Hida Viloria, Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) by Thea Hillman, or The Spectrum of Sex by Hida Viloria and Maria Nieto.

Alex Cessford

The internationally bestselling 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner Reissued to coincide with the publication of The Marriage Plot

Reissued

Lamia Hajani

Middlesex has aged incredibly well in the last 18 years. It hits upon a subject that is not often talked about in pop culture through a genuinely interesting cultural lens. The thread of intergenerationality is engrossing. I want to learn more about Lefty and Desdemona and their children and their children's children. 

Cal is a wonderful narrator who explains his childhood and his transition from girlhood to manhood with great descriptions. Although quite a long book, Middlesex flies by with detailed writing and a story that draws you in.

Peggy Walker

I thought that this was a fascinating story, and that it was very well told. Many events that may have seemed unlikely on the surface became understandable given the family background and dynamic. I thought it was very interesting in the description of the prestigious clinic of sexual identity. I would hope that today such a clinic would do a better job in exploring the sexuality of such a teenager and include them in all decision making. Very thought provoking and I would definitely recommend it.

faye

stellar prose to accompany striking characters that you can't help but love (or at least feel some sort of begrudging affection for). it unfortunately did get tedious at times in its attempt to emphasize the intricacies of family interaction, but overall a book that holds so much presence. expansive ethnic family sagas are always close to my heart. note that the book is less about cal and more about his family!

Jeannette Ordas

This book took a long time for me to get through. While I was reading it, I enjoyed it, but it wasn't something I had to quickly run to whenever I had the chance. It didn't stick in my head nor did I wonder about the characters when I wasn't reading. That changed about half-way through when the Callie started going through puberty. Only then did I find the story gripping and interesting and wonder about the book while I was doing the dishes or walking through Chinatown. Maybe because I love YA novels that when Callie was smitten with the Object, I was too. It took me a month to get through the first half and only a day to get through the rest. 4 stars it is!

Harry L

** spoiler alert **
           I loved Eugenides' novel 'The Virgin Suicides' and this was just as good. 

Great, complex characters; a sense of inevitability from the start as we see fate align to create Cal. Interesting to see how our opinions of the characters are formed: there is never a sense that Lefty and Desdemona are wrong.
Loved the view of the world through Cal's eyes - particularly being granted access to both his past and present and the implications that each moment of his past (and his parents' and grandparents' pasts before him) have had upon his present day life.

Siya S

Anna Brunner

Latitude Tamarind

not to be a person who rates books they haven't read, but i am intersex and i have watched this video by the fantastic hans lindahl (also intersex). also a lot of this book is taken from writings by an Actual Intersex Person, Herculine Barbin, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite, which i simply think is gross for a white cis guy to do.

it's possible i will eventually read this book but probably won't unless suddenly i become a much healthier person who enjoys reading incredibly weird and gross and harmful things about intersex people in order to write essays about them.

recommendation instead: Cattywampus (intersex witch girl MC).

Sonja H

The story is much better than I expected from the title, but I can't concentrate on the slow going family history right now.

This was really great.

I loved the plot. I empathized with Cal/Callie on so many levels throughout the book, with their dysphoria and experiences with other girls and guys. Jeffrey Eugenides' writing style is one of my favorite that I've seen so far, and I'll definitely be looking into more of his books. I want to write like that.

This book is kind of outdated with language/terminology and cissexist at times, but that's most probably just a product of how the world has changed since its publication. I didn't read too much into it, but I would caution against people who try to use this as a basis for information on the intersex or trans communities. The terminology used in this book is usually considered offensive nowadays. 

Highly recommended

Flavia Louise

4.5 stars
This book was very much not what I thought it would be but I really ended up enjoying it for what it was. However I found the end to be a bit rushed and abrupt.

Fernando Andrade

Jade Flynn

I thought The Virgin Suicides was awful. This is definitely a huge improvement. I do have interest in reading The Marriage Plot.

Hooman Askari

One of the best fiction novels I have ever read.

Dorian Avers

3.5

This book took me longer than it should've to read. This was a great mix of historical fiction and story telling. At times the paragraphs were almost too detailed and overrun with listings of history. It sometimes sounded more like a thesis paper than a novel. However, when I started to lose interest I was encouraged because I knew a time change or story tid-bit was in the near future.
I don't know why I'm having such a hard time writing this review. my mind is blank. I liked the ending of this book, it had a nice full-circle bow on it, but I was ready for the book to be done about 30 pages from the end. There were bits and pieces of the book, like the mythology and works of art that went over my head. And a few words that I thought were unnecessarily placed, but the writer shouldn't have to dumb down his work. I'm not an eclectic enough reader yet. 
I loved the way this book was written. The jump between past and present and an all-knowing sort of narrator, jumping from one point of view to another. I definitely want to read The Virgin Suicides by Eugenides as well.

Trevor Berrett

"When I told my life story to Dr. Luce, the place where he invariably got interested was when I came to Clementine Stark. Luce didn't care about criminally smitten grandparents or silkworm boxes or serenading clarinets. To a certain extent, I understand. I even agree."
 I agree too. This quote comes from page 263 and is really where the story picks up and gets into the subject the book promises--Cal's life as a hermaphrodite. Honestly, while the first 263 pages were interesting and had some important developing points, it could have been distilled a great deal. Eugenides is a great, fluid writer--very witty. But dang, he's wordy. I guess after reading several books by Cormac McCarthy I'm bound to get distracted by verbosity. I'm not saying I don't like long--my favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov--I just don't like all the superfluous words.
 Still, the book is compelling so far. I'm not as driven to read it as I think I should be, but I don't find myself putting it down after every paragraph to check my email either.

UPDATE: I have finished the book. In the end, I felt like it didn't deliver. I see a lot of connections Eugendides is making about identity, but they didn't seem developed. In fact, there were many symbols throughout the book that were very clever but ultimately seemed to be only that--a device used to show cleverness and not to really further the plot. Another problem I had with the book was the fact that Eugenides tells too much about his characters and yet I still feel like it is underdeveloped. For example, he has great characters in mind and some great episodes to show how they feel, but then he simply runs through the story and then tells you how the character felt--I wanted to feel how the characters felt.
 I enjoyed two things about the book. First, the Forrest Gump-like trek through American history. There are really some fascinating episodes in this book. And Eugenides does an excellent job ellaborating on them. Sometimes I felt like he should have written an essay on American history rather than this novel. The second thing I enjoyed was Eugenides sly, clever writing. I know that above I said that some things seemed to be there just to showcase the author's wit, but some of those things were really clever and enjoyable. The writing kind of reminded me of Jim Carrey's acting: at moments it was brilliant, hysterical, and spot on; but at other moments it was just too much, needed to be toned down, better controlled.
 As I said, this book didn't deliver for me. I liked it because of its promise. The idea is fascinating. However, as talented as Mr. Eugenides is, a little more control would be nice.

Middlesex

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