Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) Review
How do I write a book review without seeming completely besotted by the book? Before I try, let me say that "Middlesex" was one of the best novels I've read this year, or the last, for that matter.
Jeffrey Eugenides captures the reader from the very beginning. We are not sure who we are reading about. Or what. The reader has no choice but continue reading to figure it out. Even once we figure it out, we have to find out what happens. Such is the power of "Middlesex".
We are introduced to Cal, a Greek-American diplomat working at the U.S. embassy in Berlin. Seemingly attractive, he is strangely skittish about allowing girls near him. And there is a reason for it: Cal was born as Calliope, a hermaphrodite; Calliope who, due to her parents desire for a girl and the old doctor's inability to detect a second set of genitalia, is declared a girl. In fact, Calliope suffers from the 5-alpha-reductase deficiency; a mutation of 5-alpha-reductase, an enzyme that converts testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, causing the children with this mutation to be born with (among others) ambiguous genitalia, but female primary sex characteristics. Meaning - Calliope looked and sounded like a girl... but wasn't.
The author takes us through the story while speaking in first person, and in order to appease the confused looks on readers' faces, he takes us back, way back, to the time of Cal's grandparents; we see their life in Greek Anatolia (what is now Turkey), and the extermination of the locals by the advanced Turkish army. We also see the flight of Cal's grandparents, and their forbidden love, which gets a new chance with their chance of going to America.
Ok, I don't think I can say much more without revealing some major plot lines. However, I can say that Eugenides weaved the story of this Greek family so expertly, that I was completely and utterly absorbed. With succinct and easy-going prose we are told the entire story. No, nothing sick and twisted about Cal's growing up, to the detriment of some readers. This is not a story meant to please by scandalizing, but a story portraying an unfortunate child and his struggle with his identity. he story itself, when looked at from a side, is actually heart wrenching, but it is told with such proficiency and warmth, that we feel right at home with the narrator.
Rare is the book that will evoke an outward display of emotion with me. I generally internalize all emotions caused by a book. "Middlesex" made me laugh and cry, often in the same chapter, if not paragraph. Such wonderful sense of humor, used to chase away the "woe is me" attitude that too many people with less problems have, make this character that much more endearing. No, I didn't forget the other characters: believe me, they are just as rich and real as the character of Cal. Even the title itself has a clever double meaning: it is what a person with ambiguous genitalia is called, and is also the name of the street on which Cal grew up with his secret. And one can't help but wonder how many people go through what Cal went through, but never speak up. Very highly recommended.
***Also published on Epinions.
Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) Feature
- ISBN13: 9780312427733
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) Overview
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.
Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) Specifications
"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
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