New to the world of Jeffrey Eugenides, I turned to this book that was recently recommended to me. Its premise seemed not only intriguing, but an essential topic in this day and age of rebranding and gender fluidity. A story that takes the reader on an adventure like no other, I was hooked from the opening pages until I turned to pen this review. Calliope Helen Stephanides was born twice, once in 1960 and again in 1974. Such a bold statement to open the novel, though one that will make sense at a later point. After some housekeeping introductory narrative, Eugenides takes the story back to 1921, in what might now be called Turkey. There, Desdemona Stephanides is growing up as the country is at war. She idolizes her brother, Lefty, who is also a distant cousin by some odd coincidence. As the fighting heats up, they flee the country for America, where a distant cousin awaits them. After fudging the truth a little, both Desdemona and Lefty made it aboard a ship. They pretend not to know one another and end up falling in love and marrying. They try to use their long bloodlines to dispel some of the less than savoury aspects of this. When they arrive in America, they are shuttled off to Detroit, where the story gets richer as they live with family who have secrets of their own. Married in the eyes of the law, Desdemona and Lefty embrace the American way, without losing their Greek heritage. Eugenides spins quite the tale from there, as they have children—genetic abnormality-free—an try to provide as best they can. As the story progresses, their offspring begin to lay roots of their own, with new and exciting twists to the genetic situation. By 1960, young Calliope Stephanides is born and the oddity of her birth is missed by many. Calliope adopts the name Callie and progresses through life as a typical girl of the time, doing everything that is expected of her, at least until her early teens, when everyone around her seems to be changing. Callie cannot understand, yet there is a feeling of difference that exceeds being a late bloomer. Callie has her own life adventures, which eventually leads to a trip to the doctor. This begins even more appointments, as far away as NYC. There, it is discovered that Callie was born a hermaphrodite, with genetically male leanings. A syndrome passed along from generation to generation, Callie no longer simply feels like an outsider, but a complete stranger. Social and biological expectations rear up and the family must decide how to cope and what ought to be done. Callie seems ready to take the lead, but feels a need to ostracize from the others, if only to protect them. As the story reaches its climax, Eugenides takes Callie through 1970s America and the place gender and sexuality play in shaping the young person. With flash forwards throughout of “Cal”, an established career civil servant for the US Government in Europe, the reader can see how the protagonist landed in their feet, though there is much to tell before that point. A powerful book at every turn of the page, Jeffrey Eugenides packs so much into this piece. Recommended to those who are open-minded enough to read and enjoy discussion of the roles sex and gender have on society, as well as the reader who wants something impactful and told in a multi-generational format.

I knew only what the dust jacket covered offered when I began this book, but was so enthralled that I could not put it down. I have chosen to remain very vague in the summary section above, as it is the numerous reveals that occur there that make the story for me. Jeffrey Eugenides tells a story of a Greek family’s setting up roots in America, as they struggle to come to terms with the culture shock. Woven into the piece is the foreboding—though unknown to them—of the coming birth of Calliope, who symbolizes all the choices that were made over the decades. The story is so rich and uses a number of key characters that I cannot automatically turn to a single protagonist. The brilliance of the storytelling brought each story to light and tied things together in a masterful manner. Pushing the norms of the time (and now), Eugenides tells a tale that needs to be explored, if only to take the veiled secrecy from around it. There is so much within the pages of this book that tackles so many issues, I cannot hone in on one that is the most important. The dedicated reader will find a theme all their own and stick to it, dazzled throughout as Eugenides paints many an image. The writing was smooth and flowed effortlessly as the story spun in many directions. Eugenides seeks to shock, then lulls the reader into a degree of comfort by not scandalising things. I cannot say enough about this book and hope others I know who have not taken the time to read this do so, if only to challenge their notions of right and wrong, normal and outlandish, or expected and shocking. I know I will be back for more of Eugenides’ books, when time permits.

Kudos, Mr. Eugenides, for such a sobering tale. I cannot even begin to thank you for opening my eyes and mind to so very much!

Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/

A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

Mr. Eugenides can do everything, or at least I am convinced of such after reading Middlesex.

I passed on this book for a long time. I kept picking it up in bookstores and putting it down. I've seen quotes from it everywhere, all of which were beautiful, and kept hearing wonderful things about it from friends. To be perfectly honest, what kept me from picking it up in the subject: a hermaphrodite. I think of myself as someone with an open mind, but the thing is that I just wasn't sure if I'd be able to relate to much in this story. I made a very foolish assumption, and I'm quite embarassed about it.

Middlesex is a slow burner (my new favorite term). It begins with the story of Cal/Calliope's grandparents, which seems unnecessary in the beginning, but which makes more sense with each passing page. The story then passes on to the parents, then Cal.

A couple pages in, Eugenides describes a rather gruesome scene, and this was my signal that this is a no-holds-barred kind of author. He goes there. (This isn't to say that the book is filled with gruesome moments, just that he's not afraid to use them when he must.)

To address the smoking gun, so to speak, yes, the main character is a Hermaphrodite. Though the reader knows it throughout the book, the main character doesn't know until they're older. It seems incredulous, but Eugenides makes it work, and makes this believable. He was smart to do things this way, because I was on the edge of my seat waiting for Calliope to discover the truth. And, most likely, he keeps a lot more not-so-open minded readers this way.

There's a very frank beauty about this book - he doesn't gloss over anything, but despite the many struggles of the three generations, he doesn't feel it necessary to make his reality very bleak, either. Even when the book is at its darkest, most depressing, you're filled with sadness, but also with hope.

The other great thing about Middlesex, aside from its incredible cast of characters is how well it captures society in history - first in Detroit in the '20s (a more bleak picture than '20s of The Great Gatsby), then the '60s. The '20s are focused on the invention of the automobile - the people putting them together as opposed to the people driving them, and the impact that being part of an assembly line and big business had on people, and of course, prohibition. With the '60s, Eugenides tackles race so marvelously - the chapter about the Detroit riots is probably the best in the book, for all of the anxiety and imagery that he evokes. This book is really just as much about middle class America and family ties as it is about sexuality.

Don't make the mistake that I made by continually passing on this book - read it!

Would have given this book two more stars except for one resounding disappointment I can't get past. I thought that one of the most important aspects of the book was entirely skipped over by the author without any explanation.

*Spoiler Alert* It's probably not a spoiler, but what I have to say may alleviate some of the intrigue - you have been warned.

I really, really, really wanted to know why Calliope 'chose' to live life as Cal once she learned that she was a biological male. It was, arguably, the most important and perhaps only choice she->he had in the entire book, and the author just skips that part. This transitionless transition to living as a male stands in stark comparison to the rest of the book which does a competent job of developing each of the main characters throughout their lives...and for every other seemingly inexplicable action the reader understands the characters enough to know WHY they acted in a certain way.

The Calliope->Cal change is so abrupt in the book, and lacks any of the personal insight that the rest of the book teems with...it's almost like the author got tired of writing by the time the transition comes about (quite late in the book), and he just wanted to be done with it. Perhaps the author didn't expand on the "choice" to live as Cal because his point is supposed to be that it really wasn't a choice. But I would even have liked to know why Calliope didn't think living as Cal was a choice and was instead a biological or personal inevitability...but no aspect of her choice/lack of choice was addressed.

Inappropriate foreshortening aside, I do think that the writing is often quite eloquent. I certainly would have appreciated fewer of the cliche metaphors for change/new beginnings/etc. The author does take the obvious to new heights, however, when he would state for the reader too obtuse to understand that the egg being described actually represents an immigrant beginning life in her new land by ending the paragraph with something like, "...you see she was that egg."

ATTENTION!!!! ATTENTION!!!!
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!!!!

Instead: take your unread copies and donate them to your local public library or tuck them away on your shelves to look pretty among the assorted spines. Then immediately go and sit in front of your computer. Log on to your Audible account and use that credit for Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides, narrated by Kristoffer Tabori. You will not be sorry.

I will start off by saying that this was not at all what I thought it would be. I was expecting serious and political, written with a heavy literary hand. Not at all. Instead I got charming, witty, clever, unique, ambitious, and endearing. I laughed out loud so many times. This was humor of the dry variety: clever and subtle and easy to overlook by the those with...well, a different kind of sense of humor. And what an ending! The book started strong and just kept picking up steam. It was a snowball going down the hill, growing bigger and bigger until it satisfyingly smashed against the wall. By the last quarter of the book my life WAS THIS BOOK. I wanted to do nothing else but sit still and listen: no cleaning, no laundry. Just listening.

This was a perfect book. No flaws! Seriously! I've only made that claim once before (and that was for A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry: completely different but also perfect). And that brings me to my next point of praise: THE NARRATION. I feel like this book is strongest in audio format. This narrator WAS Calliope Stephanides. He hit all the notes with the other voices as well. This narrator delivered these lines masterfully. He had a BIG job, because this book has it all: compassionate incest, prohibition and speak-easies, questionable religious organizations, curious use of musical instruments, painful hair removal... and that's just naming a few.

If you're planning on reading this, I would urge you instead to take the audio route. Kristoffer Tabori has coaxed this work into its fullest expression with this performance. Every word was a pleasure, worthy of the Pulitzer AND a spot on my short list of the very best books I've ever read (or, listened to!) in my life. 5 STARS!!!!

Pulitzer Prize 2003. Excellent! Interesting, humorous, poignant - it had me literally from the first page and I LOVE when a story grabs me like that! This is one of those books I kept hearing about and never picked up. It was published when I was going back to school (so I was too busy), then I saw it at yard sales, airports, and I kept thinking I need to read that. But I also worried about the length (500+), the unusual sexual content, etc. Finally, my sister recommended it and I thought, all right, I need to see what this is all about. So glad I did!

It's essentially a coming-of-age story. But there's so much more. I loved all the Greek family history. There were tragic bits, but they were offset by sarcasm and humor.

I suppose some readers may be turned off by the explicit sexual identity aspect, but it was handled so well, I thought it was interesting and touching. To me, if there was something that may not work for some people, it would be the very heavy-handed narration by the main character. As he's telling his story, he is speaking to you, the reader, very directly. Almost in a Holden Caulfield manner. One line says, "reader, you may be wondering what I did with Desdemona, well, I purposely left her out of the story for a while...." - see? I often find that jarring in movies and novels, but again, it worked so well in this kind of set up. I loved it. And it made the whole story sound real. As a matter of fact, Eugenides shares a lot of similarities with the main character and has admitted that much of it is autobiographical. This story will stay with me for a long time.

"Some people inherit houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. Still others get a Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed."

Let me say first that Jeffrey Eugenides is an extraordinary storyteller! Why I’ve waited so long to read one of his books is beyond me.

Middlesex is an epic multi-generational saga of a Greek family with one of the most engaging narrative voices I’ve come across in quite some time. Calliope/Cal is an intersex person."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." I couldn’t help but be charmed by Cal. The author takes us into some places that are uncomfortable - those shadowy places that could get quite dark if handled differently. Instead we are taken there with a voice that is often humorous while still managing to be sensitive and respectful – an admirable accomplishment!

I’m not going to go into any further detail about this book – there are thousands of other reviews and my goal is to catch up on mine before summer slips away. I’ve failed to mention that this book is also rich in historical detail, and I’m always a sucker for that. Eugenides manages to weave so much history throughout and he does so quite seamlessly. Motor City, the Detroit race riots, Asia Minor conflicts, immigration issues, and family dynamics are all explored. But Middlesex is much more than that. It’s also a drama about the human condition that is so compelling that you will feel an emotional attachment to Cal. If you can set aside any feelings of uneasiness regarding some graphic sex scenes , and just allow yourself to get swept away with Cal’s story, then you are in for a real treat. A 5-star book that I highly recommend!

n  Second Read on 08/01/2016 - 22/01/2016n



Years ago, I wasn't allowed to read Twilight. I read it eventually (along with the other books in the series), twice. Did I like them? No, not particularly. All I wanted, as odd as it sounds, was to say, "I can read whatever I want as much as I want and don't have to necessarily become a Bella Swan." In other words, my secret defiance to the normal parental fears. Due to apparent lack of mental maturity on my part and the inappropriate content, I once wasn't allowed to read this book either. After about a year of driving my mom nuts, she gave in.

Earlier this month I was Skyping a GR friend. He had never read it being solely a fantasy reader, so I was trying to describe it in depth. Somehow or other, I brought the old copy upstairs and began to read aloud. We disagree on our opinions of most books, but surprisingly, he liked it. So I read the next day and the day after, up until today, when we finished it. Reading aloud and being read to are joys that I rarely experience these days, and despite all of the hard to pronounce Greek surnames, I enjoyed this greatly.

I had been contemplating re-reading this for awhile, but was afraid that my feelings towards it would have shifted. Nothing could be further from the truth. I adore this book more than I can ever hope to put into words - verbal or typed out.

n  First Read on 13/08/2014 - 14/09/2014n

n  “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.”n

This is the story of Cal, a Greek intersex man who was born male, but raised female due to the recessive condition known as 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. This means that although male, he has female traits. Before being Cal, he was known as Calliope, a long-haired, lanky teenage girl. Currently residing in Berlin, he writes about his life and the lives of family members before him. Lives that lead to his conception and condition. Lives like Desdemona and Lefty, who were Cal's grandparents. Desdemona and Lefty also happened to be third cousins and siblings. This complicated family is the main focus of Cal's story; the one he writes about and his biological one.



The story begins in 1922 with Desdemona and Lefty, who escape Smyrna (which belonged to Greece at the time) and with it The Smyrna Catastrophe, which massacred thousands of Greeks and Armenians. Let's just say that their relationship was a bit rushed. Personally, I think it was simply out of lust and desperation, but I'm not sure if that can be determined.

Roofs crashed, people screamed, as Lefty put his lips to his sister's ear. "You promised me you'd find me a nice Greek girl. Well. You're it."
On one side a man jumped into the water, trying to drown himself; on the other, a woman was giving birth, as her husband shielded her with his coat. "Kaymaste! Kaymaste!" people shouted. We're burning! We're burning!" Desdemona pointed, at the fire, at everything. "It's too late, Lefty. It doesn't matter now."
"But if we lived? You'd marry me then?"
A nod. That was all. And Lefty was gone, running toward the flames.

For me, that moment truly depicts their relationship - it's rushed and there's no introspection involved; it's simple. I got over the incest after the first two hundred or so pages, but what I think really made me dislike their relationship was the superficiality of it all. There was no love in their relationship, just the beginning of bad genetics that would later lead to the suffering of others.

And so the story continues in that direction, slowly, but surely weaving through the family tree. Lefty and Desdemona immigrated to America (Detroit, Michigan, to be exact) where they had two children: Milton and Zoe. Cal then goes on to tell us about the childhood of Milton and Tessie (his parents) and their love story.

Finally we come to Callie. I particularly liked this paragraph. Very descriptive on his part. You can almost see the moments flying by.

And so now, having been born, I'm going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I'm sucked back between my mother's legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There's a quick shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he's in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we're out of America completely; we're in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on a deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we're up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning...

I think it should be noted that half of the book is about Cal's parents and grandparents, while the other half is about him, or more specifically, his time as Callie and his transition into Cal.

I'm quickly approaching the moment of discovery: of myself by myself, which was something I knew all along and yet didn't know; and the discovery by poor half-blind Dr. Philobosian of what he'd failed to notice at my birth and continued to miss during every annual physical thereafter; and the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they'd given birth to (answer: the same child, only different); and finally, the discovery of the mutated gene that had lain buried in our bloodline for two hundred and fifty years, biding its time, waiting for Ataturk to attack, for Hajienestis to turn into glass, for a clarinet to play seductively out a back window, until, comint together with its recessive twin, it started the chain of events that led to me, here, writing in Berlin.

Cal is one of the most relatable characters I've ever read about. His style of writing is more than enough to get me out of the reading rut I've been in lately and after doing some research, I understood why. Eugenides, despite not being intersex, lived a life very similar to Cal's! That means that this book is semi-autobiographical!

The title is illusive, but the more you read, the clearer it becomes. I initially thought that it was named after Middlesex, England. After a couple of chapters, I thought that it had to do with Cal being intersex. It meant that, but it also meant other things, and the more I read, the less ambiguous it was.

I loved this book. It took me a day under a month to complete, but it was worth it. It's an engrossing book, not the kind you can read in the car or in a noisy room. Cal was one of my favourite things about it because he's just so cool!



But really, he was an amazing character. Slightly reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, whom I highly covet, but perhaps a little less rash and a little less enraged - even better.

I shelved this book as a classic even though it isn't. I think that sometimes you come across a book that's so glorious on its own that you think it should be read decades after your death. This book is the epitome of that and it will always be a classic to me.

There are still a few things that weren't clear to me at the beginning, so this certainly won't be the last time I read it. Many of the passages I quoted may seem vague, and when I first began, I missed a lot of it. That's what you get for not taking notes...Not that I mind, because it really is a wonderful book.

I honestly wish I could have done this review justice. Although it may seem like everything I've written is a spoiler, most of it is common knowledge or is known to the reader early on in the book. The rest is my take on it. I feel like there is so much more to write about! I wish I could write more about Cal. I wish I could write about Desdemona, Lefty, Milton, Tessie, Father Mike, Chapter Eleven, and the Obscure Object. I wish I could give those characters what they deserve, but I can't because then I'd be spoiling it for you. At the same time, the fact that this review doesn't feel finished to me is more than enough reason for it to be read. There is so much that can be said about it that even if I wanted to fit it all in here, I simply wouldn't be able to. This book deserves all the stars.

Real Rating: 1.5* of five

This is an unpopular opinion: I can't tell the 90s Nexus of Interchangeability men apart. This guy, Franzen, Foster Wallace, Auster, Easton Ellis, Rick Moody...I have to check the spine every so often to see whose work I'm reading. It's not bad, per se, but undistinguished and therefore indistinguishable. I've had it up to the back teeth with this blurry-edged author's stuff and don't want to read it anymore.

There. I said it. *dons anti-flying-monkey helmet and armor* Come on. Let's hear your opinions of my opinion. Nothing's gonna stop you from telling me, so might as well invite it. BTW, I don't care what y'all think of what I think...but that's never stopped a-one of y'all from sayin' it anyway.

Flying to Detroit for the Fourth of July weekend to visit my brother in Ypsilanti, I was looking for a great novel set in Michigan to read during my travels. Published in 2002, I'm confident that Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides--winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction--would be one of my favorite novels whether I read it in the Wolverine State, in a box or with a fox. This three-generational family saga leaps from Greece to Detroit, across the U.S. and then over the sea to Germany to tell the story of Cal Stephanides, whose 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome allows him to operate in society as a man, though he was raised as a girl through the age of fourteen. Cal is a hermaphrodite. I can't think of a bolder and more illustrative exploration of immigration, transformation and Americanization than this spectacular novel.

The ebb and flow of Middlesex was less like a Homeric saga and more of a tidal force. Eugenides hits with a tsunami wave with this second paragraph, which gave me an excellent idea of what I was in store for.

My birth certificate lists my name was Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license (from the Federal Republic of Germany) records my first name simply as Cal. I'm a former field hockey goalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation, rare attendant at the Greek Orthodoxy liturgy, and, for most of my adult life, an employee of the U.S. State Department. Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other. I've been ridiculed by classmates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the March of Dimes. A redheaded girl from Grosse Pointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her brother liked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimming pool turned me into a myth; I've left my body in order to occupy others--and all this happened before I turned sixteen.

Cal does break the reader away from his genuinely unique childhood in Detroit to return to the point in his family history where nature generated a winning lottery ticket for this DNA. In the summer of 1922, his grandmother Desdemona Stephanides is a young woman, a silk worker in the Greek village of Bithynios, a thousand feet above the old Ottoman capital of Bursa. Her parents killed by Turks in a recent war, Desdemona lives as a free Greek with her brother Eleutherios ("Lefty"), a gambler by nature who idolizes the mustached thieves and gamblers of the seaside bars in Athens and Constantinople. Desdemona's silkworms produce the silk which Lefty then sells at market in Bursa, though lately, she's noticed her brother coming home later and later. Lefty tells her it's because there are no women in the village, at least, no desirable ones.

Desdemona puts great effort into giving the two eligible bachelorettes in her village a makeover and playing matchmaker for her degenerate brother, but Lefty rejects his suitors, making it clear he'd prefer Desdemona. Intimately bonded with Lefty her entire life, she reciprocates that emotion. When the Turks rout the Greeks and begin to retake the disputed territory where Bithynios sits, Desdemona and Lefty flee on foot to the port of Smyrna. Starving with all the other refugees, Lefty is given some money and medical care by Nishan Philobosian, M.D., an Armenian physician who believes he is safe from reprisal due to a letter confirming he treated Kemal Pasha. Desdemona and Lefty hold out hope they can board a ship and emigrate to America, where they have a cousin in Detroit. But while Allied ships watch, the Turks burn the port and begin to massacre everyone in sight.

Thinking fast, Lefty not only secures French visas for himself and his "wife" Desdemona, but Dr. Philobosian as well. Boarding a New York bound vessel from Athens, Desdemona and Lefty begin to reinvent themselves: Desdemona gives the last name "Aristos" and boards separately from her brother. With expert spycraft, they pretend to meet on the ship's deck, fabricate elaborate backstories for themselves and "court" each other for the passengers to see. Their wedding commences in the Atlantic Ocean crossing, their honeymoon under a tarp covering one of the lifeboats. In one of many dexterous moments in his narrative, Eugenides makes both incest and illegal immigration seem less like the acts of criminals and more like acts of survival. Cal's grandparents would've preferred to remain in Bithynios, but couldn't survive there. So, they change.

Traveling made it easier. Sailing across the ocean among half a thousand perfect strangers conveyed an anonymity in which my grandparents could recreate themselves. The driving spirit of the Giulia was self-transformation. Staring out to sea, tobacco farmers imagined themselves as race car drivers, silk dyers as Wall Street tycoons, millinery girls as fan dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies. Gray ocean stretched in all directions. Europe and Asia Minor were dead behind them. Ahead lay America and new horizons.

Desdemona and Lefty's cousin Sourmelina meets them at Grand Trunk Station. Lina was sent away from the village after being caught in one too many compromising positions with women. Her family offered a dowry to a good Greek boy, an American, named Jimmy Zismiopoulos, alias "Zizmo." Zizmo is an importer of "assorted fuels." As soon as Prohibition was announced, he relocated to the biggest city with the closest proximity to Canada. Detroit. Zizmo uses his connections at Ford to get Lefty a job on the assembly line, which Lefty makes great strides in before the company finds out about Zizmo's affiliations and fires his brother-in-law. In a case of bad timing, Desdemona and Lina conceive children on the same night. To make ends meet, Lefty opens a speakeasy in the basement, a place with irregular hours he calls The Zebra Room.

Desdemona gives birth to a son named Miltiades ("Milton"). Lina has a daughter named Theodora, who picks up the nickname "Tessie." The year is 1923. His gambling streak alive and well, Lefty opens an above-the-ground Zebra Room off West Grand Boulevard. Twenty-one years later, cousins Milton and Tessie share a backyard fence. Desdemona attempts to arrange a marriage between her son and a good Greek girl, but her matchmaking skills fail all over again when Milton shows greater interest in Tessie. He serenades her through his window or over the telephone by playing the clarinet. Tessie is courted by a seminarian at Greek Orthodox school and ultimately agrees to marry him. Milton enlists in the Navy to get even with her. Tessie spends a lot of time at the movies, having second thoughts about being a priest's wife.

Whatever the reason, in the bedroom light of the movie theater Tessie Zizmo allows herself to remember things she's been trying to forget: a clarinet nosing its way up her leg like an invading force itself, tracing an arrow to her own island empire, an empire which, she realizes at that moment, she is giving up to the wrong man. While the flickering beam of the movie projector slants through the darkness over her head, Tessie admits to herself that she doesn't want to marry Michael Antoniou. She doesn't want to be a priest's wife or movie to Greece. As she gazes at Milton in the newsreel, her eyes fill with tears and she says out loud, "There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you."

Facing certain death as a signalman in the Pacific, Milton scores a 98 on a service exam, is whisked away from combat and accepted into the Naval Academy. Returning to Detroit, he marries Tessie and takes over operation of the Zebra Room, remodeling the place and planning an expansion. Milton and Tessie give birth to a son--whom Cal refers to throughout as "Chapter 11"--and later try for another child. Wary of the excessive testosterone in her home, Tessie wants a girl, and defies the Old World predictions of Desdemona to deliver a daughter the couple named Calliope. Neither the pediatrician or the family physician--an aging Dr. Philobosian--notice that Calliope is not like other infant girls, but 5-alpha-reductase deficiency is hard to detect, until Calliope, a product of astronomical luck, reaches puberty and androgens begin to flood her circulatory system.

Middlesex is as close to a flawless novel as I think I've read. There might be readers unable to make the logical leaps that I did, or overlook the plot developments I was able to--incest is very wrong, right?--but what takes up greater real estate for me is mystery. Eugenides exposes secret histories, hidden places and unusual human beings that just haven't been examined by a Big Novel before. Not like this. The novel is every bit as great as East of Eden. Much like Steinbeck, Eugenides infuses the Stephanides family narrative with lust, conspiracies, makeovers, ambitions and missteps. These are people cut with deep passions and frailties. These are Americans, regardless of what their name is, where they come from originally, what they look like or what their gender identity is.

The writing is drenched wit and passion. A crucial story development comes down to Milton being able to seduce Tessie not with any sexual instruments, but while they're still inexperienced in that department, placing the bell of his clarinet on various parts of her anatomy.

And so it began. He played "Begin the Beguine" against Tessie's collarbone. He played "Moonface" against her smooth cheeks. Pressing the clarinet right up against the red toenails that had so dazzled him, he played "It Goes To Your Feet." With a secrecy they didn't acknowledge, Milton and Tessie drifted off to quiet parts of the house, and there, lifting her skirt a little, or removing a sock, or once, when nobody was home, pulling up her blouse to expose her lower back, Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.

I never realized the extent of the genocides of the Greek and Armenian people by Turkish forces, while the Allied Powers stood by. I never knew that Henry Ford was so devoted to virtue that his sociological department visited workers at their home to make sure they spoke English, owned a mortgage and exhibited proper hygiene. I wasn't aware of the extent of the Detroit uprising by blacks against the National Guard--which history continues to record as a "riot"--in 1967. Eugenides finds compelling ways to explore history, not through the lecture, but by immersing his characters, and the reader, in these episodes. Desdemona goes to work in Black Bottom, the black ghetto in Detroit, for the Nation of Islam as a silk dyer and in addition to being remarkably compelling as a story development--we wonder how a Greek immigrant is going to make out hired by militants--Eugenides shows the reader why the community was primed to explode thirty years later.

I haven't discussed Cal or the kink in his genetic mapping much at all. The book isn't about a hermaphrodite at all, even though later chapters of Middlesex are as richly detailed on the facts of life in the intersex community as anything else I've mentioned. The characters he meets as he runs away from home at the age of fourteen, fleeing corrective surgery all the way to San Francisco are every bit as fascinating at those in Cal's biological family. Zora, a shapely blonde with Androgen Insensitivity who like Cal, developed as a female, says, "There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already."

The search for the Great American Novel is bound to bring you around to Middlesex eventually.

Despite the advertised promise for this being ... "a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination and of love..." (NYTBR) I have found fewer instances of such banality in the writing, the subject matter, the lack of imagination. Hackneyed and over-borrowed story lines strain the reader's patience to the very brink of screaming-out-loud ennui. Good Gods on Olympus, you gave this man a Pulitzer for this? The wine must have been especially potent that year, or it flowed much too freely.

This book hurts every sensibility I have as a discriminating reader of good fiction.

I know a lot of people love it and I don't want to discourage anyone from reading it because I can see how it could be epic to some readers. The story and topic are important but I wish it would have focused on the actual gender fluidity and struggles more than it did. That part of the story really starts somewhere between pages 300-400 and I was desperate to skip anything that came before it. I enjoyed about 80 pages of the story. Considered throwing it against the wall more than anything. It felt absolutely endless.

People are always asking me what I'm reading these days. Whether I chalk it up to a need for entertainment during pandemic isolation or the usual summer read queries, I'm always happy to talk books and recommend where possible. What surprised me during my reading of Middlesex was just how often I got a "Oh, I've read that, it's great!" Indeed, as I read along I found more and more of my non-Goodreads friends, and even those who aren't huge readers, had read and loved this book. It's kind of rare for me to be on the other side of a swell of recommendations, but I'm happy to report that Middlesex definitely lives up to its well-deserved hype and wide audience.

I think the sales' pitch most people get for Middlesex centres on Calliope Stephanides evolution into Cal Stephanides, but there's a whole lot more here worth mentioning. The novel is a sprawling, detailed, and meticulously constructed multigenerational tale. Indeed, though Cal's celebrated and memorable narration snapped up my attention in the novel's opening lines, I was a little surprised to find out that Calliope isn't even born until midway through the book. Nonetheless, I was never disappointed to spend time with Lefty and Desdemona on their immigration from Greece to Detroit and always excited to see what became of the various members of the Stephanides family tree. To my scientific eye, I thought the familial tale told through a recessive gene was accurate and eloquent. If only all my medical papers were as pleasant to read!

Though the story didn't always light my hair on fire, Eugenides writing was like gas on a grass fire. Even though it can be occasionally dense, it was never a chore to get through Middlesex. Instead, it was rather like indulging in a rich delicacy, one worth savouring in small increments. Though the book works very well on a sentence-to-sentence basis, it sings over paragraphs and chapters with ornately constructed and compelling writing. Though I'm excited to read more Eugenides (this is my first), I do wonder if he is able to capture lightning in a bottle in quite the same way he did with Cal's signature omniscient style and voice.

On a personal note, Middlesex ended up being the perfect novel to read in the late days of my wife's pregnancy and the arrival of our firstborn son. The various pregnancies, births, and family structures across generations bloomed in moments of personal anticipation, trepidation, and relatability. It's always special when the right book finds you at the right time--Middlesex has been living on my shelves for years--and I think my personal circumstances enhanced my experience of the novel.

Even though I'm all about Middlesex, I didn't feel the red-hot poker of absolute adoration I have for some of my other favourite novels of the year. Instead I've got a continuous and even-keeled sense of enjoyment and appreciation in the hours since I finished the read. It's undoubtedly a five-star read* and is easily recommendable, but doesn't quite unseat two or three other favourites from the year. In any case, don't mind me sorting through my arbitrary personal rankings, Middlesex is 100% a novel worth your time.

*Upon further reflection, I've downgraded this one to a very solid 4-star rating. I've read some really terrific novels and short story collections in 2020 that kind of put this one into perspective a little more. Still a great and recommended read from me!

This the seventh book of my 2020 Pulitzer Challenge.