This is a wonderful story full of colorful, involving characters. The author takes us through a troubled, racially conflicted city of Detroit, almost making it a character.

The city's race riots are memorably depicted.

There is much to digest, especially as we watch Cal struggle with her/his own identity.

A truly captivating story worthy of all its' acclaim.

This isn’t so much a review as an embarrassing story. I gave the book four stars for a reason. The writing is beautiful. I would recommend it. Now onwards to my shame.

So Brooke and I were standing in line to meet Eugenides. Please understand it was a really long line after a similarly long day at work. We passed the time chitchatting about this and that at our workplace and life in general. By the time the organizer offered post-its* to our segment of the line, we were getting silly and joked about all the crazy names and titles you could request. Instead of sticking to your name, you could put down “Boo-Bear” or “Sunshine Sally”. Just imagine: you could have an autographed book with some outrageous inscription like “To the best unicorn, Jeffrey Eugenides”.

Throughout the course of the night, I had been trying to persuade Brooke to visit a bookstore I thought she would enjoy. She was reluctant for unknown reasons. Under the influence of a bizarre mixture of exasperation, exhaustion, and silliness, I proposed a bet. I had already written my plain-ole name on the post-it. If she promised to accompany me to an event at the bookstore, I would add “baby” under my name. She quickly agreed.

As we waited thereafter, I began to second guess the stunt. But before I could request a new post-it, the line betrayed me. While it had moved at a glacial pace initially, now it swept me forward.

When I handed Eugenides my book, he stared at the post-it for a second and then looked up at us. He asked, “Who is Cassy Baby? Is that you?” I was mortified. Utterly mortified. I tried to quickly explain the promised bookstore visit, but I think in actuality I just pointed at Brooke and mumbled something like, “She made me.”

Looking back, the whole episode could be construed as a power struggle. Could a literary nobody force a Pulitzer Prize winner to write something stupid? If he refused, he might seem like a jerk. His best option was probably to play along and, bless his heart, he did. Perhaps he thought it was amusing. I doubt it. So, here it is:

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Who was the real winner out of this mess? Brooke. Allow me to list the ways. (1) She was witness to my shame. (2) She did visit the bookstore – although she ditched for me the promised event and went on her own later. (3) As I suspected she would, she became a fan of said bookstore. (4) And this is the cherry on the top: Eugenides inscribed her book to “Brooke Baby”.
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*If you want your book personalized, the host will generally hand out post-its. You write your name on the post-it and place it on the title page where the author will sign. This way the author doesn’t struggle to spell your name correctly.

I've been lounging around in bed all day today, slobbering on this book like a crushing schoolgirl. I'm reluctant to use the word, but this book is truly "epic," and not in a frat-boy kind of way. I don't want to give anything away, so I won't discuss any plot points. But really, the plot plays second string to Eugenides' style. Never in my life have I read a book so smooth, like a malty drink, like a wet porpoise, like clear mountain air. (so maybe these metaphors aren't apealing, but it's an attempted imitation that falls laughably short.) Fuck. Terrific, explosive, obsessively-woven style. I mean, there's not one fucking word in this whole book that doesn't fit perfectly in. There's an unobstructed flow. If this were a movie, not one single shot would be stationary, complete movement of the camera, and not just through the physical space, but through time, plot, and unseen ironies. I couldn't put it down. My roommate barely stopped me from changing my facebook status to "I got Stendhal Syndrome from the Middlesex." I can't say a bad thing about this book. Dizzyingly, intimidatingly fabulous writing. You're a dumb shit if you don't read it.

2015 view:
Winner 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Eugenides incredible way of looking at 'who we are' by recounting three generations of a Greek family that emigrated to the United States, through the eyes of third gender(!) Cal. As ever with Eugenides exceptionally well written, yet accessible - a masterpiece. 9 out of 12

2013 view:
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - Eugenides epic saga of three generations of an American-Greek family as told by Calliope Stephanides, a young person with a rare genetic condition directly caused by previous generations' behaviour. A grand and expansive drama, that didn't really grab me, as much as such books usually do. All my friends love this book, so I'd still strongly recommend it still. Gotta reread this on eday, but 5 out of 12. 5 out of 12 from me though.

2015 read; 2013 read

With apologies to all my friends who gave this one 5 stars, I just couldn't get there. For one thing, it was too long, but I never wanted to stop reading, I was just ready to be done. For another thing, there was too much going on. US and Greek history, cultural changes, so much backstory before getting to Calliope/Cal plot lines, but it was all part of what we needed to know. The writing kept me going, as did Cal's voice as narrator, and the humor. It was a meandering family saga disguised as a coming of age tale.

Still, I've been wanting to read this for years, since I read and loved Virgin Suicides, his first novel. It's on all the "best of" lists and even won the Pulitzer. Of course that's no guarantee that I will consider it great myself. Some of the best books I've ever read are on no one's list but my own. I'm planning to choose one of those for my next read.

Opening sentence: “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.”

Coming of age and family saga centered around an intersexed protagonist, Calliope (Cal) Stephanides, who, in 1960, is born with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency and is reared as female but feels more closely aligned with male. It is a constant struggle to deal with societal expectations, particularly nearing puberty. The storyline explains the origin of the genetic mutation, starting with Cal’s grandparents in 1922. It follows their migration from Greece to Michigan, the courtship and marriage of Cal’s parents, and several members of their extended family.

It is narrated in first person by Cal in a timeline that loops from present to past and back again. Eugenides can certainly spin a tale. There is a lot going on in this novel. It covers a wide swath of historic events, such as the 1920s war between Greece and Turkey, legends related to the discovery of silk, rum-running during Prohibition, Detroit’s civil unrest in 1967, San Francisco’s colorful hippie scene in the early 1970s, and the theories espoused by sexologists of the era.

The writing is top rate. Written with sensitivity, humor, and intelligence, the author makes it easy to empathize with Cal. I had not read anything by Eugenides before and I was not sure how much I would enjoy this one, but I am now a fan.

"I think love breaks all taboos, don't you?"

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Narrated by Kristoffer Tabori

Books such as this, should be compulsory school reading in this increasing intolerant, unempathetic society of ours. When one listens to right-wing, conservative commentators on ‘shows’ like Fox News, or Sky News in Australia (go on, you know you want to.......), one would think LGBTQ+ issues have the future of our planet in their hands. When millions are starving, hundreds of thousands at war, the planet on the boil – a trans swimmer trying to get into the Olympic team, or teaching kids at school about trans and intersex issues spells the end of time, as we know it.

This book puts us into the skin, the mind and body of an hermaphrodite, intersex kid called Calliope. Calliope is raised as a girl, has XY sex chromosomes, but her testes have not descended, and her clitoris is larger than ‘usual’.

The reason I suggest ‘intolerants’ should read this is, to help them understand how difficult it is for people (young people) to deal with such issues. If this five hundred plus page story does not do that – then there is no hope.

But it is far more than just a book on ‘trans’ people – it is a sweeping family saga covering three generations from the war-torn city of Smyrna in Eastern Turkey to Detroit in the USA. It is wonderful historical fiction, covering the Greece/Turkey conflict - as old as the ages, immigrants and their challenges and life in an industrial city like Detroit.

Eugenides writes with no great fanfare, he describes the complexities of life and relationships with ease. He throws in comedic moment - because, let's face it, life can be funny. Very funny. But, I feel he also knows he is telling us a very important story. He does that indeed.

What a book, what an epic, what an author. One of my favourites - I need to construct my all-time top ten in 2024. This will be in it to be sure.

5 Stars

For some unfathomable reason, I decided to start working Pulitzer Prize winning novels into my regular reading. I'd already read several, and it just seems like a good idea.

Middlesex wasn't exactly what I expected. Heck, I'm not really sure what I expected. What I knew was that the protagonist was a girl who discovered that she was really a boy at the age of 14. What I didn't expect was a warm, loving, often funny family saga. Jeffrey Eugenides quite clearly has a fondness for his Greek heritage and treats his characters with a great deal of affection. Middlesex reminded me a lot of The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving. While it's not as zany as Irving's work, it has that same affectionate quirkiness. It's hard not to like the characters and feel sympathy for them even when they're doing the wrong thing. I thought Eugenides' use of a first-person omniscient narrator was probably the most daring aspect of the book. For some reason, the incest, the sexuality and the gender confusion weren't in the least exploitative or titillating. I came away feeling like I understood what it must really be like to be a man who was raised as a girl. I felt I understood the Greek immigrant experience. I loved the back-drop of twentieth-century Detroit and how the setting was as much a character as the people. I felt like Lefty, Desdemona, Milton, Tessie, Chapter Eleven and Callie were my family and I loved them like family, quirks and all. This was definitely worth reading.

Εξαιρετικό έργο, από έναν ιδιαίτερα ταλαντούχο συγγραφέα, του οποίου η ικανότητα της αφήγησης είναι εντυπωσιακή. Θίγει ένα θέμα taboo (δυστυχώς) για την σημερινή κοινωνία με πολύ ωραίο τρόπο, με τον τρόπο δηλαδή που θα έπρεπε να αντιμετωπίζουμε ως "προοδευτική" σύγχρονη κοινωνία. Είναι, επίσης, ενδιαφέροντα τα ιστορικά στοιχεία για την καταστροφή της Σμύρνης και από την άλλη μια συνοπτική περιγραφή της Αμερικής του πρώτου μισού του 20ού αιώνα.

This was unexpected in many ways. Mostly because I had thought, I’m not sure why, that this would be a sort of mock 19th Century novel set in England and probably about people getting married. So I had that feeling you get when you take a sip of your coffee and realise you are drinking from the wrong glass and have a mouthful of chi latte instead of espresso. That this was a book about a Greek American family between about 1900 to about 1980 and told by an intersexual child was just about as far away from what I was expecting as it is possible to get.

I find I’m increasingly wondering about the point of literature lately. And this is a good example of my worries. The parts of this that I thought worked remarkably well where the bits where the book was fairly clearly based on some version of the author’s family’s experience. The story of a Greek couple coming to America, marrying on the ship on the way over, starting a family and then all of the complications of their lives and loves was beautifully crafted and told with an almost Beat Gen urgency that the whole thing raced along and was pure pleasure. The other stories, of incest and of a little girl becoming an adolescent boy, didn’t really work as well for me. I think the kind of magic realism of a lot of this worked against the story in some ways too.

Right, let me explain. I think if you are going to write about someone seriously unusual – and someone doing a Tiresias (a comparison that is used throughout the book, with the main character being compared to Greece’s most famous sex-change artist) then you probably need to make the rest of the novel as normal as possible. The Tiresias comparison is really interesting – Tiresias having perfect vision of the future, our narrator having perfect vision of the past. Oddly enough, I found the stuff at the start – the brother and sister getting married – much more believable then the stuff at the end. The running away and ending up in a kind of swimming porn peep show was all a bit too bizarre for me, I’m afraid.

Even though I’ve warned you there will be spoilers in this review I don’t want to tell you too much as I am a bit worried that people might read go on to read this book anyway, and I really don’t want to overly spoil it for you – I must say there really were lots of things I loved about the book – but some of the twists were just too neat. I spent a lot of the last part of the book thinking I’d had a brain fart and had missed how the grandmother had died. I didn’t like how the Negro silkworm factory story became a family story or how the kidnap story resolved itself – I found both so improbable that they nearly stopped me reading.

But parts of this novel really tasted of saganiki, others of deep fried white bait, I could smell the tang of lemon throughout and sometimes even the woody flavour of Retsina – I mean that, the Greek parts of this book are so nice that I forgive the rest for all else.

Which brings me back to where I started. I really didn’t believe the story of the hermaphrodite, it didn’t ring true to me at all (and there’s another thing – I’ve read Ovid and yet didn’t remember the Hermes and Aphrodite connection – which is very, very strange given the name – if I don’t remember that what do I remember?). But other parts of this were magical.

Sin lugar a dudas, una de las mejores novelas del siglo XXI.

La historia de Calíope (o Cal) es la excusa del autor para mostrarnos la vida de los inmigrantes griegos en la América de principios de siglo. Todo ello, ademas, en Detroit, ciudad que tuvo su época de gloria antes de hundirse en la miseria. Y, de fondo, la dura realidad de las personas hermafroditas.

Pero no pensemos que es un libro triste. Todo lo contrario. Por sus casi 700 páginas desfilan personajes increíbles, situaciones asombrosas, y mucho sentido del humor.

No sé cómo estuve tanto tiempo sin haber leído este libro.