What a big pile of everything this is!

I like books like Middlesex, one's that stretch over generations, capturing historic moments in time from different perspectives and encapsulating an era. But sometimes they can be too busy, and Middlesex is toooo damn busy.

Part of the problem is that the transgender struggles of the main character are plenty of story to work with, so there's no need to tie in an immigration from the motherland tale or set it against the 1960s Detroit riots as a background. All that extra makes this great book too fussy. Certainly a setting is needed. But there's backdrop settings and then there's settings with curtains, drapes, murals, and suddenly it's smothering the bloody scene!

Having said that, Middlesex is still a fun, intriguing read. Though perhaps it's not the "instant classic" it's been made out to be. Frankly, I'm surprised it won the Pulitzer. But read it and you'll probably enjoy it. Don't read it and you'll get on just fine.

I like books with family stories but it was very dull at some parts.

For me the start was really exciting with the grandparents.
The when they got to America it dragged for me. Over abundance of information.
Picked up towards the end again when it was more about Cal's discovery.

Middlesex is much more than a gender novel. It’s a big book, in length, depth, and breadth, and yet it’s compelling and thoroughly readable. If you’ve held off reading Middlesex, feeling skeptical or intimidated, you really shouldn’t wait any longer.

My full review of Middlesex is up now on Keeping Up With The Penguins.

I had very high hopes for Middlesex based on its reputation, but I was disappointed. While there are elements that were engaging, this is such an inconsistent novel that it’s hard to praise its virtues without also pointing out its many flaws.

The writing is very uneven, at times perceptive and evocative, but more often transparent, hackneyed and lacking in subtlety. Through most of the story I felt there was an absence of human sensitivity; a lack of integrity to the characters: they come across simply as empty vehicles for the plot. And for this reason much of the story felt like one inconsequential occurrence after another, rather than describing major events of profound significance to a family.

Throughout the “family-saga” section of the novel, Eugenides maintains reader engagement by hinting at the forthcoming story of Cal’s gender transition, which forms the later part of the novel. I found myself questioning the logic of this two part structure. Firstly, because the family saga is largely tangential to Cal’s own story, and secondly because Cal’s story is so comparatively short and poorly developed that it doesn’t justify such a long and detailed build-up. If I were an editor I would almost recommend cutting the family saga from the novel, if not for the fact that it is easily the best part. In any case, as it stands, Middlesex is an odd construction, with the first part being interesting but immaterial, and the second poorly developed and generally underwhelming.

Then again it won the Pulitzer, so what do I know?

Фантастична книга! Просто фантастична. Не можех да спра да чета, а спирах ли, не можех да се отърся от мисълта за тази история... Не знам защо чак сега стигам до нея, "Мидълсекс" е истински шедьовър!

you had me at generational family saga

'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides is one of those superb literary novels which is the hope of every writer to write in their lifetime. It is in the same monumental achievement category for Literature as Moby-Dick, or, the Whale or One Hundred Years of Solitude or War and Peace. ‘Middlesex’ manages to include underlying themes of almost everything about being human especially when people are under some very dramatic pressures because of historical events.

The author uses remarkable locations and events for his story. The book profiles three generations of a fictional immigrant Greek Armenian family, the Stephanides. It is semi-autobiographical. Apparently, Eugenides heard about a terrible genocidal attack in 1922 on Greek Armenians living in a city called Smyrna, which today is a city in Turkey. Invading Turks massacred everyone they were able to catch - Armemians, Greeks, Jews - who were living in Smyrna in peace. Eugenides uses this terrible invasion to begin the saga of a silkworm-farming family begun by a brother and sister who survive the massacre.

Eleutherios ‘Lefty’ Stephanides and his sister Desdemona escape the war horrors of their original home by immigrating to Detroit, Michigan. They chose Detroit simply because they have a cousin living there, Sourmelina, or Lina for short. Lina married a gangster, Jimmy Zismiopoulos, or Zizmo. Lina does not love Zizmo, but she needed to escape her small Greek village because she was suspected of being a lesbian. Zizmo smuggles booze from Canada into the United States because of the profits to be made by ignoring the USA's law called 'Prohibition', which was passed to stop alcohol consumption. Lefty's dream is to own a restaurant, but it will be some time before he can do so. He has much to learn about a culture so radically different from his previous life.

Everyone has come to America for a better life. Eleutherios, or Lefty, marries Desdemona - yes, gentle reader, the siblings marry. Brother and sister become husband and wife. They have a son, Miltiades, or Martin, who eventually marries his 'cousin', Theodora, or Tessie, the daughter of Sourmelina. No one is aware of the sibling status of Lefty and Desdemona, except Sourmelina, and she isn't going to tell. The small Greek hill towns of origin for this family were full of related villagers who are not always fastidious about who was cousin to whom. Even so, Lefty and Desdemona are aware of the religious prohibitions against their marriage. Desdemona, an Orthodox Christian, is afraid she will go to Hell. Only much later do they discover there might be some sort of medical problems with their children. All of them barely understand anything about genetic complications. Besides, there are basic matters of survival on the front burner, finding and keeping jobs, having children, and learning about the complicated race relations of American cities.

A lot of living and striving is done, and sacrifices are made, but eventually, somehow, the family continues. The eternal story of immigrant assimilation plays out for forty percent of this novel, and it is fascinating. The author is a wonderful writer and he has done detailed research about Detroit, his home town, making it real. There was a lot of colorful drama that took place in 'Motown' - who knew?

But eventually, what Desdemona has feared all of her life happens after her son Martin and his cousin/wife Tessie have a child. Their daughter, Calliope Stephanides, appears to be a girl for fourteen years of her life. But physical problems begin to show up during puberty, beginning with no sign of menstruation. When her medical condition is diagnosed, Calliope is afraid and is completely confused about her gender identity. What is s/he, male or female? Both? Is that possible? Yes, it is. Martin and Tessie agree with the doctors she should have an operation to make her a girl forever. But Calliope runs away from home, hitchhiking to San Francisco.

Will Calliope, or Cal as s/he calls herself, find out who s/he is, gentle reader? Will Martin and Tessie accept Cal's decision?

Disruption is occurring all over the United States - the Vietnam War, civil rights riots, college kids rejecting the values of their parents, violent protests against 'the establishment', President Nixon's struggle to avoid being impeached. Identity is a question the entire country is struggling with, gentle reader! But Cal is only fourteen years old, an innocent upper-class kid (her father Martin is a successful businessman). S/he runs away from home, despite being too young and inexperienced to do so, to unknown territories.


The plot of ‘Middlesex’ is sometimes shocking, but it is realistic. It is an engaging story about an immigrant family's assimilation into a new country. The surface events can be understood symbolically in multidimensional levels and viewpoints which gives this novel a literary heft.

'Middlesex' answers the question "what is being human?" Science and education and self-knowledge and superstition are essential to the characters of 'Middlesex'. Ignorance, guilt, pride and love are invariably filtered through religions, class, culture, place, science and community. Identity is arguably the most important key to "what is human" - and the most often misunderstood. Is there a correct, or one-size-fits-all, human identity? Obviously no, but that doesn't stop many of us from trying at one time or another to shoehorn every individual, especially our children, into a culturally-imposed and defined identity.

Hint: The variety of available forms humans can have and how we choose to live and how we end up living through often serendipitous happenings is actually HUGE, even if all of us are distinctly and recognizably human in nature with a common styling. Culture, environment and belief are top-floor add-ons. It is the bottom floor of living cells upon which the framework of culture is built, and fate is whichever stairs we find on our way.


If you have read 'Moby Dick' AND 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' AND 'War and Peace', well! Five stars to you! Each of those books have been written by authors from different cultures and eras, yet they are amazingly similar in vision, despite the changes in technology, language and ideas (and whatever personal theories held by the authors)! 'Middlesex' is another which should be added to this lauded and worthy canon of Literature, in my humble opinion. They each share a wide-angle look at Humanity through the vehicle of actual history and fact illustrated with realistic and imagined, perhaps some autobiographical, fictional characters. However, as perhaps you may have already intuited, these canon books are long, full of historical detail, with a lot of pleasant and unpleasant realities regarding family and community life, responsibilities and expectations, over many decades. Historical fiction readers, especially those with a literary bent, will have little problem in reading 'Middlesex'. Those readers who enjoy heavy and fast action thriller genres should probably borrow the book if one is going to attempt reading it. 'Middlesex' is a deep dive into exploring identity through a domestic generational family drama - not a quick read.

; )

«— Хіба не легше було залишитися тим, ким ти був?
Я підняв голову, зазирнув мамі в очі й сказав:
— А я й залишився.»

Зізнайтеся: час від часу багатьом з нас дуже хочеться його – грубенького роману, цеглинки на сотні і сотні сторінок, історії родини в різних поколіннях, цікавенного історичного тла, живих персонажів, з якими за час читання можна буквально породичатися. Хочеться, правда?
Це саме такий роман! Він включає в себе все-все перелічене, ну, і ще рецесивний ген п’ятої хромосоми.

a combination of a bildungsroman and a family saga, middlesex traces the impact of a mutated gene across three generations of a greek family, and how it shapes the protagonist cal’s life. eugenides cites the explorations of hermaphrodism in greek myths as an inspiration for the novel, in which cal acts out the story of hermaphroditus, the greek deity of bisexuality and effeminacy.

this book was published in 2002 so it’s kind of a given that the language around gender identity is a little outdated, but it’s still an incredible portrait of a young intersex man seeking to understand himself, his identity, his sexuality, his heritage, and carve out his own future.

There can’t be many novels about hermaphrodites, but I know of at least two great ones (the other is Annabel by Kathleen Winter). This Pulitzer Prize winner by Jeffrey Eugenides is one of the best novels I’ve read in the last decade or so. It’s a sprawling Greek family epic (reminiscent of the best sections of Corelli’s Mandolin) told from the perspective of Callie/Cal Stephanides, a hermaphrodite trying to figure out her/his place in the world, beginning as a teenager in 1970s Detroit.

Cal traces his family history back to 1920s Greece and Turkey, where an incident of incest may have increased the genetic likelihood of his intersex condition. You will be gripped from the exquisite first sentence onwards: “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.”

Ίσως δεν πρέπει να χρησιμοποιώ τη λέξη αριστούργημα παρά μόνο σε εξαιρετικές περιπτώσεις όπως αυτή. Το είχα διαβάσει όταν βγήκε, με είχε συνταράξει αλλά μετά από 15 χρόνια ακόμα και από ένα τέτοιο βιβλίο δε θυμάσαι και πολλά. Αξίζει να ξαναδιαβαστεί όπως το αξίζουν και όλα τα σπουδαία βιβλία που έχουμε συναντήσει στη ζωή μας, μια πολυτέλεια -πλέον- στην οποία δεν υποκύπτω με τόση ευκολία λόγω πίεσης χρόνου, τεράστιας λίστας to-read που προκύπτει από τη συνεχή ροή πληροφορίας στο ίντερνετ και αυξανόμενου όγκου αδιάβαστων βιβλίων στο σπίτι. Είναι από τις μεγαλύτερες απολαύσεις μου όμως και πρέπει το re-read να ξαναμπεί στη ζωή μου έστω και εις βάρος όλων των παραπάνω.
Λόγοι για τους οποίους βρίσκω το Middlesex αριστούργημα - πέρα από τους προφανείς:
1. Η ανάπτυξη χαρακτήρων. Τόσο δουλεμένη, τόσο λεπτομερής, τόσο άρτια.
2. Η γραμμική εξέλιξη της ιστορίας, κάτι που μου λείπει πολύ στα σύγχρονα φιλόδοξα μυθιστορήματα.
3. Ο επίλογος, που παραμένει για μένα το σημαντικότερο κομμάτι στα βιβλία.

#readathon18 [24/26] ~ [ένα βιβλίο που θα έπρεπε να διδάσκεται στα σχολεία]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Book #15: Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

The story in a nutshell:
The tale of "the most famous hermaphrodite in history," Middlesex is the second and latest novel by Greek-American Midwesterner Jeffrey Eugenides, his first being the cult hit (and eventual Sophia Coppola movie) The Virgin Suicides. And indeed, both of these things about Eugenides should be noted in this case, because the book is not just about a hermaphrodite who is "discovered" by a pop psychologist at the height of the "let it all hang out" 1970s (hence being the most "famous" hermaphrodite in history), but a Greek-American hermaphrodite who grew up just outside of Detroit, Michigan, one who grew up as a normal girl and never suspected anything different about herself when younger, due to an aging pediatrician her family was too loyal to stop going to during Calliope/Cal's childhood. As such, then, the vast majority of the book is not about Cal at all, but rather the two generations of Greeks and then Greek-Americans who led her/him to the place where she/he now is; from Cal's grandparents who just happened to be brother and sister as well, a fact conveniently hidden by the two of them during their rushed emigration to America during the Greece/Turkey border wars of the 1920s, to Cal's parents as well, who happen to be cousins themselves and who grew up as best friends in Detroit in the 1940s and '50s. After tackling the adulthoods of both these generations, then, and all the Forrest Gumpesque historical/narrative coincidences that happen in their lives (Detroit race riots! Turk invasions!), Eugenides finally gets around to telling Cal's unique story, and of the way she eventually morphed into a he during her/his tumultuous puberty in '70s San Francisco.

The argument for it being a classic:
Well, you can't argue with results, Middlesex's fans say; this did win the 2002 Pulitzer Freaking Prize, after all, considered by many to be the most prestigious literary award on the planet, not to mention the more important honor of being picked a few years later for the Blessed and Glorious Oprah's Book Club Hallowed Be Her Name Amen. And it's easy to see why once you read the book, its fans say -- because Eugenides has a naturally clear yet engaging writing style, telling funny and sad stories that many people can relate to but always in a highly original way. The signs are clear that this will eventually be considered a classic anyway, fans claim, so we might as well start treating it like one now.

The argument against:
Now, there's a much different argument to be spelled out by this book's critics; they'll claim that Middlesex is actually two novels mashed together, with it being obvious that Eugenides started by writing a tight, inventive, very delightful 150-page novel about the hermaphrodite main character him/herself, currently serving as the last 150 pages of this 550-page book. Ah, but then someone like Eugenides' agent or publicist must've said something like, "Jeff, baby, we can't sell this as a potential Pulitzer winner if it's only 150 pages! And hey, don't you know how hot quirky epic novels about the immigrant experience are these days? So why don't you, I don't know, tack another 400 pages onto the beginning of this, 400 pages that have absolutely nothing to do with your original novel but is instead a sitcom-worthy look at the utterly stereotypical lives of the generations that came before the hermaphrodite, a story so hackneyed and obvious that we might as well retitle the book My Big Fat Greek Film-Rights Paycheck? Yeah, that's the ticket!" And thus do you end up with this mishmash of a trainwreck, the critics say, something not quite a clever magical-realism tale for the hipsters and not quite a heartwarming family tale for the Oprah mouthbreathers, that only won the Pulitzer in the first place because of the political correctness of the Millennial years.

My verdict:
So first let me admit that I had no idea this book had been written in 2002, until I sat down to actually read it; there's been so many amazing things said about it in the last few years, after all, I had mistakenly assumed that it was 40 or 50 years old at this point, a mistake I won't be repeating in the future. And indeed, this is why those who love "classics" lists love them with such an intensity, and why the most important criterion for all these lists seems to be whether the book has stood the test of time; because just to use today's book as an example, in this case the critics are right, with it hard to tell if this book didn't get the accolades it did simply because the academic community in the late 1990s and early 2000s was searching so desperately at the time for weighty family sagas about the immigrant experience, written by people of color with immigrant backgrounds who just happened to have academic cred (which Eugenides has -- he's a literature professor at Princeton, just like our old friend Joyce Carol Oates).

In 50 years, will people look back on books like this one and sadly shake their heads, asking each other, "What were all those PC freaks at the turn of the century thinking, anyway?" It's hard to answer a question like that right now, a mere half a decade since the book came out in the first place (although I have a strong suspicion what the answer will eventually be); and this is why books that are less than 30 or 40 years old generally are not considered for such classics lists, because it's simply impossible to gauge ahead of time how well they will stand up over the decades. It's why I'm giving Middlesex today a definitive "no" to the question of whether it's a classic, and even warning readers that it's not a very good novel in general either, especially for a Pulitzer winner. A real disappointment today, probably my biggest since starting this essay series back in January.

Is it a classic? No