World Famous Comics: Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
By: Jeffrey Eugenides Publisher: Picador Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Picador Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 544 Publication Date: June 05, 2002 Release Date: June 05, 2007
"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 Review: "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
3 and half stars I really enjoyed the historical aspect of the book - Detroit through most of the 1900's, Turkey and Greece in the early 1900's. I also learned a lot and it made me much more sympathetic to gender issues brought out in the book. Having said that I wish it could have been about 200 pages shorter. I found myself plodding through it at times. I thought the story of the grandparents could have been condensed to about 50 pages but it went on and on and on. I also could have done without some of the detail at the San Francisco peep show. The ick factor at times was just way too high for me.
Kudos to the author on what must have been an incredible amount of research.
FANTASTIC!! After hearing the mention of this book on Oprah's show, I decided to purchase it. I'm not a big book reader, but I couldn't put it down. I took it everywhere with me for two weeks. I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end. Now, I'm trying to decide who I will pass it along too.
Must Read This was an amazing book. Eugenides tells a sprawling tale of the Stephanides family told from the perspective of a hermaphrodite (Cal) to explain the sequence of events that led him to become the person that he is. It is riveting from the second Eugenides begins in Turkey with Cal's grandparents childhood to the conclusion of the narrative in Berlin. At the same time funny, touching, and heart-breaking this book provides a level of humanity not seen in much literature today.
Middlesex, A Novel I can't review something I have not yet received. It has been over 30 days and the book has not yet arrived.
Boring! If you like incestual relationships, this may be the book for you. Half the book is family history and deals with the grandparents incestual relationship and then the parents semi-incestual relationship. It isn't described as a particularly bad thing that a brother and sister get married and you will even have to endure "sex scenes" between the two. It then insults people who actually are intersex by giving the impression that the incest is what caused the baby to be born that way. The book doesn't get around to the story of Cal who is supposedly the main character. I was really looking forward to reading about Cal and his life which would have been fascinating. Instead I got a ton of boring family history that has nothing to do with the life of the main character, complete with a ton of useless crap, like the grandmothers ovulation and the fathers wierd relationship with his cousin in which he gives her thrills by touching her with his clarinet. It is actually a little disturbing. I don't know why pulitzer or Oprah thought this book was so good. I am quite confused.
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