Wait a minute.....

I KNOW I rated this book....Even wrote a review ....(so I thought).

Just how many books had I read --that were FAVORITES ---that I said nothing??? I especially loved the ending!

Apparently --'several'!

I must have had more of a life -before- I wrote reviews! haha!

I started reading this book with high hopes because of all the great reviews I had read and heard. Not sure why the rave reviews. I definitely found the book interesting but at the same time disturbing and hard to read at times. The whole incest thing didn't do it for me and it wasn't until the end of the book when the book touched on the scientific explanation of the childs condition did I find it interesting to read. The writer spent way too much time on some of the family history which did nothing for the book as a whole, and didnt spend enough time going into how the main character finally adjusted to life once she/he realized what was wrong with her/him. The most annoying part was the brothers name and having to read it over and over. Not sure what the author was thinking when he came up with that one, and it was never explained which made it even more annoying. Another thing is that he left many of the characters underdeveloped and I felt left wondering what happened to them once I finished the book--and not in a good way. I felt unsatisfied when finished, which I don't think is a good way to feel after reading an intense book.

If you can't tell, I didn't enjoy this book.

Don't judge a book by its cover.

I'd seen this book on the shelves of a number of friends and in the arms of a number of travelers, so I decided to pick it up. The title, "Middlesex", suggested English countryside to me. On the cover was what looked like a steamship, and a quote on the back began "Part Tristram Shanty, part-Ishmael..." So I came to the foolish conclusion that this was some 19th century English seafaring novel. (Typical.)

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Middlesex is the story of an intersex person who grew up as Calliope but discovered in her adolescence that she is actually more Cal than Calliope. More specifically, Middlesex (the title takes on a new meaning now) is the story of three generations of a Greek family and the incestuous genetic and social history that enables the existence of Cal, who narrates the story.

The novel is epic. It spans nearly a century and traces the Stephanides family from battle-torn Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, across an Atlantic voyage, from the street corners of Detroit, through World War II, and out to the suburban haven of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The novel incorporates details upon details from all different spheres of life, dropping name brands from different time periods and regions and incorporating specialized jargon from a wide range of fields--Jeffrey Eugenides must have done an immense, immense amount of research during the writing process.

And the scope is as broad as the focus is often narrow. Over the course of 20th century, the Stephanides family responds to and participates in political, social, and cultural movements, and through them, we feel not only the sweep of a small Greek enclave, but also the sweep of a nation's growth as it engages Prohibition, World War II, the idealism of the 50s, the revolutions of the 60s and 70s, and more. The story is as much about the conflicts within a country as it is about a family trying to face its secrets, past and present.

Through it all, Cal, as a narrator, is clever and endearing. A story about an intersex individual sounds unfamiliar to most at first, and there are moments in the novel when Cal faces the visceral or fearful reactions that arise in those prone to fear. But, from page one, Eugenides clears the air, setting us on a fresh foundation, and we discover a character who faces familiar childhood and adolescent trials and tribulations--we discover the humanity of a character one might otherwise find alienated elsewhere.

Do I recommend it? Yes. It's a good tale for the modern age.
Would I teach it? Not likely. At 527 pages, it's just too long.
Lasting impression? Epic. I'll remember it for the incredible depth and breadth of knowledge it demonstrates. This novel impresses upon me the amount of research that an author must do to prepare for a serious work.

Calliope (Cal) Stephanides, born after World War II, was raised as a girl until the teenage years. Then, at 14, puberty kicked in and Cal matured into a boy.



Doctors found that Cal was a hermaphrodite with male (XY) sex chromosomes, intersex genitals, and a recessive genetic mutation that messes with the sex hormones.

But Cal's story (and genetic troubles) started long before, in 1922, when his Greek grandparents lived in Smyrna, Turkey. Unable to find suitable mates a brother and sister - Desdemona and Lefty Stephanides - fell in love. Driven out of Smyrna by a Turkish rebellion Desdemona and Lefty married on the boat to America, determined to keep their sibling relationship a secret.


Turkish Rebellion



Unfortunately Desdemona and Lefty each carried one copy of the mutated gene that would eventually cause Cal's troubles.



But this sprawling novel - in turns dramatic, funny, and tragic - is much more than the story of a hermaphrodite. It tells of life in Smyrna, the experiences of Greek immigrants in Detroit, arranged marriages, complicated family interactions and intermarriages, the silk industry, riots in Smyrna and Detroit, the rise of Islam and black power in the United States, and much more.


Greek immigrants in Detroit


Silk industry


Riots in Detroit

At the heart of the book is Cal's fascinating trajectory. Always feeling that something was wrong, Cal was an awkward girl who fell in love with a female classmate, had first sex with a boy, and was devastated when her "male" condition was revealed. Cal has a dramatic reaction to this revelation which leads to the book's climax. Definitely a book worth reading.

You can follow my reviews at https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot....

This would have been better as an NPR story or an episode of "This American Life" than a novel. Or maybe if someone other than Eugenides had written it. An interesting idea, and a few engrossing sex scenes (I like the "crocus" and the peep-tank, and the whole long flirtation with The Object drew me in completely), and a nice two pages toward the end when Julie accepts Cal for what he is. But the prose was awful: frequent maneuvers like "And me? That's simple. I was . . . " are really unacceptable. And "Sing, Muse, of Greek ladies and their battle against unsightly hair!" is about as funny as poop.

Except for the incest, the long family-history plot was like a mashup of immigrant dramas from cable TV: Greek family barely escapes home country to make it to the United States, where they wander through 20th century history in a dull procession of unmotivated Gumpy forays into Wikipedia that have no effect whatsoever on their character development. (Now we'll shove these characters through Prohibition! mass production! the Detroit race riots! The partition of Cyprus! San Francisco hippies! the tragedy of Michael Dukakis's helmet moment! and . . . the founding of the Nation of Islam!)

The incest part of the story was good in the beginning -- the early love scenes between the grandparents are wonderful -- and then impressively tedious (Desdemona feels guilt! and then . . . she feels guilt again!). The metaphors are embarassingly bad: Cal lives on a street named Middlesex, and eventually finds reconciliation of the two sides of himself in Berlin after reunification. Why not have Desdemona live on "I Feel Guilty For Sleeping With My Brother Boulevard"?

Cal remains completely undefined as a character, except in terms of his understandably tough time figuring out his own identity; "confused" isn't much of a character. Everyone else in the book fails to exist at all. Jimmy Zizmo turns out to be the founder of the Nation of Islam? Eugenides says self-importantly that "you've probably guessed" that -- no! Not only did I not guess it, it doesn't make any sense, logical or emotional, and it's completely uninteresting. Why not have him turn out to be Richard Nixon? Uncle Mike turns out to be a psychopath who extorts his own family? Why? Who cares?

Cal's lack of voice or character is the worst thing: if your book aims to show readers what it's like inside the world of an intersex person, you should show us that world from the inside in a way that makes sense, or at least a way that's interesting. Cal has no voice, no face, no identity. What voice there is is completely inconsistent with his behavior -- the current Cal is reticent, shy, depressed, lonely, and retiring; our narrator is open, boisterous, discursive, ironic, omniscient for no particular reason, and irritatingly jokey.

And the book no more has ideas about sexuality than it does about Cal's character. As one reviewer said, the most disappointing thing about the book is it ends up reinforcing stereotyped, dumb ideas about gender (like "Breasts have the same effect on me as on anyone with my testosterone level" -- as if there were no gays). Callie's pursuit of The Object doesn't make her question categories, it just convinces her she's a boy. There is no middle sex here; there's no middle ground; it's more gawking than Tiresias-like insight.

"Middlesex" von Jeffrey Eugenides ist ein Roman über das 5-alpha-Reduktase-Mangel-Syndrom. Calliope Helen Stephanides wird 1960 mit eben diesem Syndrom geboren. Die Ärzte sagen den Eltern, dass ihr Kind ein Mädchen ist. So wird Calliope dann auch erzogen. Im Alter von vierzehn Jahren ändert sich Callies Situation. Sie entscheidet sich dafür, ein Mann zu sein.

Der Roman verhandelt zwei Formen der Identität. Im ersten Teil des Buches geht es um nationale und kulturelle Identität. Die Großeltern von Calliope fliehen nach dem Massaker von Smyrna im Jahr 1922 und wandern in die USA ein. Die griechisch-orthodoxe Kultur lebt vor allem in der Großmutter weiter. Diese Kultur trifft auf die amerikanische Gesellschaft, die durch Aspekte wie die Autoindustrie, Selfmade-Geschäftsmänner oder den Vietnamkrieg geprägt ist. Dieser Teil des Romans ist ein großes Epos. Es gibt viele Referenzen zur Antike (Calliope, Teiresias, Hermaphroditos). Ein Zeitraum von etwa fünfzig Jahren mit Themen wie Krieg, Flucht, Integration, Wirtschaft oder Rassismus wird in einer sehr szenischen Art und Weise erzählt.

Der zweite Teil des Romans behandelt die geschlechtliche Identität. Calliope befindet sich zwischen den Geschlechtern. Genetisch ist sie durch X- und Y-Chromosom ein Mann, sozial ist sie eine Frau. Im Englischen würde man wohl von Sex versus Gender sprechen. "Denk dran, Cal. Geschlecht ist biologisch, Gender ist kulturell." Die szenische Erzählung ändert sich im zweiten Teil. Der Text ist nun weniger episch, er ist eher ein fokussiertes Drama mit vielen reflektierenden Passagen.

Das Buch ist vor etwa zwanzig Jahren erschienen. Die Themen und die Sprache haben in diesen Jahren keinerlei Staub angesetzt. Der Roman ist auch heute noch spannend. Themen wie Flucht, Integration oder Gender sind überaus aktuell. Da die Themen hier grandios in Literatur umgesetzt sind, wird dieser moderne Klassiker wohl auch noch in fünfzig Jahren gelesen werden. Ich jedenfalls habe ich mich gerne auf "die Achterbahnfahrt eines Gens durch die Zeit" begeben.

What ever it was that compelled me last time didn't seem to pull me into the story as much this time. I felt a rather big disconnect to the story so I'm dnfing it. Maybe I'll give it a reread some other time but this time I've got to many other books I rather want to read

---
It was a very interesting book, very long and sometimes it feelt like it draged a bit, but I did overall enjoy it. Some parts of it was very engaging. Not quite a 5 stars but not far from it

This book literally changed my life.

Years ago I bought a Dean Koontz book for a long plane ride and hated it, because Dean Koontz sucks. So I bought Middlesex at a layover, thinking the Pulitzer badge might mean it was better than Dean Koontz. And it was this majestic, wonderful thing and I loved it passionately. And I said to myself, you know what? I'm just not going to read any more shitty books. And I never did.

Best generation-spanning hermaphrodite epic ever.

Da bambina, a sette-otto anni, cantavo nel coro della parrocchia, insieme a diversi miei compagni di scuola. Cantavo in un coro misto, dove eravamo tanti bambini e bambine con voci uguali, poi c’erano i grandi, quelli con un principio di barba e baffi che erano tenori o bassi. All’epoca nessuna meraviglia mi veniva dal fatto che maschi e femmine avessero voci simili, senza differenziazione di sesso; anzi, all’epoca non sapevo nemmeno cosa fosse il sesso. Non mi ponevo proprio la domanda di cosa accadeva nel corpo umano a un certo punto, da trasformarlo in modo da far nascere la voce cupa e la barba ai maschi e far venire le curve in certi posti alle femmine: beata età infantile! Cosa c’entra con Middlesex, ci si domanderà. Prima parlo del libro, poi spiego.
Middlesex è un romanzo “epico”: Calliope, non a caso il nome della Musa ispiratrice di Omero, narra in prima persona la saga familiare degli Stephanides, che prende il via all’inizio del ‘900 in Turchia per arrivare all’America del proibizionismo, della seconda guerra mondiale, dei conflitti razziali fino alla guerra in Vietnam e al Watergate, attraversando due continenti senza che il legame tra i mondi, rappresentato dalla nonna Desdemona Stephanides, si spezzi mai, anzi rafforzandosi con il trascorrere degli anni, finchè la Grecia, patria lontana, diviene un luogo mitico di cui sempre si parla ma mai si vedrà.
Middlesex è un viaggio nei segreti di una famiglia nel cui sangue, in un susseguirsi di matrimoni e nascite, si trasmette come una macchia un’alterazione genetica, la carenza di un enzima, che, latente e silenziosa fino ad allora, viene alla luce proprio in Calliope, trasformando la sua vita in una odissea.
Questo è il punto. Middlesex è la metafora del periglioso viaggio verso la presa di coscienza, anche e prima di tutto sessuale, che ogni individuo affronta nel percorso dell’esistenza, dal momento del concepimento, quando potenzialmente si è sia maschio che femmina, attraverso l’infanzia, condizione di sessualità informe e silente, un mondo in cui i giochi fantasiosi comprendono indifferentemente maschi e femmine in una gioiosa confusione di generi, fino ad arrivare al momento in cui la sessualità esplode all’improvviso cogliendoci impreparati, l’adolescenza. Da qui cominciano i pericoli, le paure, i turbamenti, le tentazioni e le voglie che porteranno alla formazione di un uomo o una donna, ben individuato nel suo genere, incasellato nella scacchiera della vita.
Nascere e crescere significa dunque mutilarsi dell’altra parte di sé, significa abbandonare lo stato di perfezione che eravamo al tempo del concepimento e assumere a mano a mano un ruolo di cui prima di ogni altro noi stessi dobbiamo prendere consapevolezza? Oppure il dubbio è che ogni perfezione nasconde un guasto, una mancanza, e deve essere considerata come un ostacolo da superare, come una tappa nel percorso della vita?
A questo punto non occorre spiegare l’incipit del commento. Termino semplicemente consigliando la lettura del romanzo, coinvolgente e ricco nella scrittura e nelle idee.

4.5 stars

The whole story is a kind of confession by the main character. It includes the history of his, or her, grandparents who were forced to flee to the US due to the Turkish-Greek arm conflict at the beginning of the 20th century. It narrates the love story of the protagonist’s parents. Finally, it covers a part of the protagonist's adult life as a man. This type of narration resembles a family saga, such as Buddenbrooks or One hundred years of solitude.

Born and raised as a girl, when she reaches her adolescence our heroine discovers more or less unexpectedly that she has a special genetic mutation. The author himself explains: “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.”

One of the most important things that one might draw from this book is the idea that can be well expressed in the following citation: “After I returned from San Francisco and started living as a male, my family found that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that important.”
In other words, we all are in the first place just humans with our own characteristics and individual traits. Yes, they depend on our gender, but also on many other factors. Gender itself is determined by various socio-cultural factors, such as upbringing and education, not only by chromosomal sex. That’s why it would be rather stupid to stick a label on anyone only based on their sex. It would be unwise to give so much significance to the different social roles and behavioral patterns attributed to females and males. Life is much more complex than that.
Moreover, the ability to accept something new or very uncommon and to integrate it into our lives can be very helpful and contribute to our personal development. This is the case with the family of our protagonist.
Although he ends up living as a male, he nevertheless remains his mother’s daughter, bringing together both masculine and feminine sides. People who love him have to accept it. As it turns out in the end, they manage to do it and get used to the change he goes through from a girl to a boy.

However, as a proverb puts it, there is always a black fly in your Chardonnay- there are almost five hundred pages in this book and too many details. The reader may feel lost in them.

Alright, it’s high time I review this hermaphroditic little masterpiece.

Being a pseudo-biochemist (pseudo in the sense that I only pretend to be a biochemist, whereas in reality I write scientific development reports and other documents that no one will ever read but which I’ve convinced myself are just as fulfilling as doing real science), I find the premise of this novel to be incredibly interesting.

5α-Reductase deficiency is an autosomal recessive disorder; autosomal meaning that the gene coding for 5α-Reductase is not located on a sex chromosome (X or Y), and recessive meaning that one would need two copies of a mutated form of the gene in order to express the disease trait. Since we as a biological species inherit one copy of every gene from each of our parents, it would not be enough to have only one mutated form of this gene because a single “good” copy is all that’s required for proper function. Because of this, the proper-functioning gene is considered to be completely dominant over the mutated form in terms of phenotypic expression.

Here is a Punnett square showing basic concepts of Mendelian genetics:

n  n  
n  Each form of the gene is called an allele: “B” represents the dominant allele, or the healthy gene form; “b” represents the recessive allele.n  
n

If both parents are phenotypically “normal,” the only way they would be able to have any offspring with this disease is if they were both carriers, meaning they each have one dominant and one recessive allele. In this way, they are said to be heterozygous for this trait, the genotype of which is represented as “Bb.” For any child they conceive, there would exist a 25% chance of that child inheriting two recessive alleles. This is referred to as being homozygous recessive, the genotype of which is represented as “bb.” Only homozygous recessive children will express the disease.

Since the protagonist of this novel has unluckily inherited both recessive alleles, one from each of his parents, he ends up with the disorder. So what is this disorder, exactly? The 5α-Reductase gene codes for an enzyme which converts testosterone into a potent sex steroid called dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, which plays a fundamental role in the formation of the male sex organs. Since disease subjects do not have the ability to convert testosterone into DHT, they end up with too much testosterone and not enough DHT, which in some cases leads to the formation of ambiguous genitalia.

These ambiguous genitalia form one of the many, but probably the most interesting, subjects of the novel. The author begins by tracing the history of these recessive alleles back through the family lineage before elegantly leading us to the budding of the protagonist’s crocus: his ambiguous little penis stub (yes, you should click there; and yes, you should see that movie). Perhaps not surprisingly, the historical tracing reveals some ancestral inbreeding, as well. And since the protagonist is still genotypically male (even though he doesn’t know it and neither do his parents or anybody else), the real fun begins when he enters puberty.

When I met with my book club to talk about this fantastic novel, a few pronoun choices were used for describing the protagonist: he, she, he-she-it, etc. But all joking aside, the protagonist is male. He is male by genotypic definition (he has two healthy sex chromosomes, one of which is a Y), and he sexually identifies himself as male which is consistent with other real-life sufferers of 5α-Reductase deficiency.

Όπως έχω πει ξανά σε κριτικές μου, δε διαβάζω συχνά την υπόθεση ενός βιβλίου στο οπισθόφυλλο. Είτε θα ακούσω κάτι, είτε θα διαβάσω γιαυτό στο περίπου, η θα μου προτείνει κάποιος.. Έτσι συχνά βρίσκομαι προ εκπλήξεων. Κάποιες φορές ευχάριστων κάποιες δυσάρεστων. Ας ειπωθεί από νωρίς ότι αυτό το βιβλίο ήταν μια πολύ πολύ ευχάριστη έκπληξη. Αρχικά θεωρούσα λοιπόν πως αυτό το βιβλίο θα είναι αυστηρά για τη ζωή ενός ιντερσεξ ατόμου. Όμως το Middlesex είναι πολύ περισσότερα από αυτό. Ο κεντρικός ήρωας είναι ο Καλ, ο οποίος γεννήθηκε ως Καλλιόπη με μια ιδιαιτεροτητα : ένα μεταλλαγμένο γονιδιο. Είναι αμφιφυλος ή αλλιώς μεσοφυλικος (intersex) ή όπως αναφέρεται στο βιβλίο, ερμαφρόδιτος(ο όρος αυτός όπως διάβασα και ενημερώθηκα μετά το βιβλίο, δεν είναι πια δόκιμος και θεωρείται προσβλητικός και στιγματικος για τα άτομα αυτά). Το βιβλίο λοιπόν ασχολείται όχι τόσο με τη ζωή του Καλ ως ένα intersex άτομο, αλλά το γιατί και πως "αποφάσισαν" τα γονίδια του να γίνει έτσι. Ιστορίες του παρελθόντος, πολλές γενιές πριν, ένοχα μυστικά, βιολογία, τύχη, συμπτώσεις, προκαταληψεις, μοίρα, όλα ενώνονται για να δημιουργήσουν έναν άνθρωπο που για 15 χρόνια ζούσε ως κορίτσι τυχαία, αλλά από κει και πέρα έζησε συνειδητά ως άντρας.
Η ιστορία νομίζω ότι δε χρειάζεται πολλη προσπάθεια για να σε πείσει, να σε τραβήξει. Είναι εξαιρετι��ά ενδιαφέρον το θέμα. Αυτό που μου έκανε εντύπωση ήταν  η γραφη του Ευγενιδη, που πραγματικά ήταν εθιστική. Ζωντανή, απλή, άκρως ενδιαφέρουσα, δε μπορούσα να αφήσω το βιβλίο από τα χέρια μου. Και φυσικά στα θετικά θα προσθέσω ότι είναι ένα από τα βιβλία που σου μαθαίνουν το κάτι παραπάνω, σε προχωράνε ένα βήμα παραπέρα, ειδικά αν έχεις τη διάθεση να ψάξεις 2 πράγματα μετά το τέλος της ανάγνωσης. Το συνιστω ανεπιφύλακτα.

"Δεν είχα μεγαλώσει αρκετά ακόμη ώστε να συνειδητοποιω ότι ζώντας ένας άνθρωπος, πορεύεται όχι προς το μελλον, αλλά  προς το παρελθόν, στην παιδική του ηλικία και πριν ακόμη από τη γέννηση, ώσπου στο τελος φτάνει να επικοινωνεί σιωπηρα με τους νεκρούς. Μεγαλώνεις, λαχανιαζεις στις σκάλες, μπαίνεις στο σώμα του πατέρα σου. Από κει, με ένα γρήγορο σαλτο, φτάνεις ίσαμε τους παππούδες σου, κι ύστερα πριν το καλοκαταλάβεις, ταξιδεύεις στο χρόνο. Σ αυτήν τη ζωή μεγαλώνουμε ανάποδα. "