This book is so many things, does so many things, takes you so many places, I don't even know where to begin describing how much I loved it. It is really quite astounding. It is a masterpiece. I don't usually like to throw that word around too much. Like a famous four letter word it should be used sparingly lest its contact with the world cheapen it. It too often appears in the form of a blurb on the cover of some loose baggy monster à la Bellow or Chabon that is hundreds of pages too long. Not many fat books deserve their girth. This one wears its corpulence proudly like Sir John Falstaff. So I repeat: Middlesex is a masterpiece. Say that again. Rolls right off the tongue, don't it?

First of all there are the characters, which can feel a little stereotypical at times, but they really gain in depth as the story reaches its conclusion. They became so real to me in fact that finishing the book was a form of bereavement. And there are not just one or two great characters here but three generations of them!

Then there's the story itself with all of its unexpected plot twists and turns and irresistible forward motion. It has this incredible generosity, a quality not often found in novels today, I'm afraid.

And then there's the writing -- the rich, beautiful, I could almost say Popean, writing: "Sing, Muse, of Greek ladies and their battle against unsightly hair! Sing of depilatory creams and tweezers! Of bleach and beeswax! Sing how the unsightly black fuzz, like the Persian legions of Darius, sweeps over the Achaean mainland of girls barely into their teens!"

And finally there's the heart. This book made me cry more than once. I don't usually cry when I read; I'd even kind of lost faith in a novel's ability to make me cry. I thought my tears were reserved for cheesy romantic comedies watched on long-haul flights over the arctic -- a phenomenon brought on by fatigue and the effects on the soul of pressurized air at high altitudes. But Middlesex made me cry real tears, human tears, tears flowing from some secret fount deep inside and out through my eyes onto the book lying open on my kitchen table in the wee hours of the morning.

Eugenides has made me a true believer in a type of novel I'd all but given up on. I throw myself shamelessly down at the feet of that holiest of holy art forms: the fat masterpiece!

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.

Author Jeffrey Eugenides’ talent is huge, and taking a rare genetic combination and setting it in Detroit, Michigan takes such a talent. I loved this narrator who slipped from telling a story to speaking directly to the reader, then shifted storylines and time frames and smoothly wove an addictive tale.

Too many layers in this book to list them all here. What a treat I have just been served (especially for a Michigander and a granddaughter of Greek immigrants). 5+ stars.

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.

(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

“Siamo tutti fatti di molte parti,
altre metà.”

Non so se vi capita di dover commentare un libro appena letto ed essere sopraffatti dalle troppe cose da dire e (o) dal profondo desiderio di comunicare quanto questa lettura sia entrata nel proprio profondo.
Devo dire che, personalmente, mi è successo più volte e questo è, per l’appunto uno di questi casi.
D’altro canto, penso, Eugenides ci ha messo nove anni per scrivere questo romanzo, come potrei io parlarne in poche righe?

Qualcosa, però, lo vorrei dire.

Mi facilito, pertanto, il compito partendo semplicemente dall’incipit attraverso il quale la voce narrante si presenta:

” Sono nato due volte: bambina, la prima, un giorno di gennaio del 1960 in una Detroit straordinariamente priva di smog, e maschio adolescente, la seconda, nell’agosto del 1974, al pronto soccorso di Petoskey, nel Michigan. Non è impossibile che un lettore specializzato abbia letto notizie sul mio conto nello studio del dottor Peter Luce, Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites pubblicato nel 1975 dal “Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology”. Oppure potreste aver visto la mia fotografia pubblicata nel capitolo sedici di Genetics and Heredity, un testo ormai tristemente obsoleto. Sono io la ragazza nuda in piedi accanto a un’asta graduata per misurare l’altezza a pagina 578, gli occhi nascosti da una striscia nera.
All’anagrafe sono registrata come Calliope Helen Stephanides. Nella mia patente di guida più recente (rilasciata dalla Repubblica Federale Tedesca) il mio nome è Cal.”



Per raccontarci la sua vita, Cal riannoda i fili della movimentata storia di questa famiglia greca.
Da uno sperduto paesino turco, attraverso le fiamme che hanno ridotto in cenere la splendida Smirne (1922) per andare, poi, a rifugiarsi a Detroit, capitale dell’industria automobilistica.

America è una parola che indica luoghi e modi di vivere sconosciuti.
Le generazioni si susseguono lavorando per camuffare le origini e costruire una nuova identità culturale.
Avvince la storia della famiglia Stephanides inserita in episodi che sembra parlino anche d’altro ma, poi, a conti fatti, non fanno altro che allargare il focus e, così, si arriva al luglio 1967 e Detroit esplode in una rivolta che porta a galla tutte le contraddizioni della società americana.

Per gli Stephanides sarà una svolta che li porterà a vivere in un quartiere elegante:
a Middlesex Boulevard; la terra di mezzo dove Calliope sviluppa la storia di questo inconsapevole contrabbando genetico.

Un romanzo di grande e meravigliosa densità dove tutto si colloca con gran perfezione, dove l’autore si prende cura di ogni personaggio.

Piaciuto molto, molto, molto.
Tanto da non aver parole...



“Cantami, o diva, del quinto cromosoma la mutazione recessiva! Cantami di come fiorì sui pendii del Monte Olimpo, due secoli e mezzo or sono, tra capre che belavano e olive che rotolavano. Cantami le nove generazioni per cui viaggiò sotto mentite spoglie, sopito nel sangue inquinato della famiglia Stephanides. E cantami la Provvidenza, che sotto forma di massacro lo risvegliò per trasportarlo, come fa con i semi il vento, fino in America, dove le piogge industriali lo fecero precipitare su quel fertile terreno del Midwest che era il ventre di mia madre.
Scusate se ogni tanto divento un po’ omerico. Anche questo è genetico.”

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.

L-am citit cu întârziere pe Jeffrey Eugenides, sunt 20 de ani de când a scris Middlesex. Cred ca impactul asupra mea ar fi fost mult mai puternic atunci decât acum, asta pentru ca lumea s-a schimbat destul de mult, sau o parte din ea măcar, cea in care mă găsesc și eu. Cumva mintea mea făcuse loc destul pentru ca această lectură sa se așeze confortabil, cu tot înțelesul ei. Asta nu înseamnă că nu este în continuare relevanta, dimpotrivă, le-as oferi-o multora drept lectură obligatorie. Daca exista un lacăt peste noțiunile de corespondenta dintre sex și gen, aici este el spart. Cu blândețe și cu luciditate si chiar cu mult umor. Este o carte care ne impune sa ne revizuim normele, pe cele mai străvechi si pe cele mai fixe. Lumea este prea săracă și prea strictă atunci cand împarte oamenii doar in femei și bărbați. Este o realitate. Cine se opune ei este in poziția celor care spun ca pământul e plat.
Dar in afară de asta, cartea este si o foarte reușită poveste a unei familii de greci, cu trei generații, un război, un secret, o strămutare, o devenire si o decădere. Nu se putea ca ea sa nu-mi vorbească foarte intim. Pe toti refugiații, strămutați, emigranții, o sa-i unească întotdeauna un petec de teritoriu comun. Oricât de diferite sunt experientele lor, traiectoriile lor, ei au in comun o piesa de baza, exact ca șasiul unei masini. Orice model se configurează deasupra, lucrul care sta la temelie, este tot ăla.
Foarte mișto, este o carte de citit, nu stiu daca de recitit, neapărat.

Middlesex has been stacked in a pile of books I like to refer to as my "Jumanji" books. The two main child characters in the film Jumanji begin a creepy, larger-than-life board game that results in the "Little Man Tate" boy disappearing, and the the young girl running away in horror, putting an abrupt end to the game. Though stowed away in the attic soon after the occurrence and forgotten, a distant jungle drum beat still emanates from the board game, forever beckoning that someone continue the game, and finish what was started.

That pretty much sums up my avoidance dance with this amazingly beautiful book. I first began this audio book in 2007, and got so carried away in the language and pace of the narrative, that I knew I wanted to dedicate more time and attention to it, for fear of missing any details. I returned the book to the library and bought a physical copy from my local used book store. Since then, Middlesex has sat in that pile of "Jumanji" books, forever beckoning me to finish what I started. Sure it's made it's way into my purse a few times, and followed by a few false starts, but nothing lasting. Even the cajoling from well meaning friends in that "I can't believe you haven't read that yet!" voice didn't help. So finally, after 7 years, I broke down and bought the audio book and downloaded it to my phone last week, so that I could take it and the Stephanides family with me everywhere. What a journey we've had!

n  n   

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

n  n So begins this sweeping family saga of three generations of Calliope/Cal's family beginning in Asia Minor on through to Detroit, and finally ending in Berlin spanning the 1920s to present. Through this historical narrative, we learn about the Stephanides family and their dark family secret. Told in a sort of whimsical voice, with Woody Allenesque aside interruptions, it's hard not to get swept up in the story and totally lose yourself, or to find yourself laughing out loud, or rolling your eyes incredulously. I can easily believe that this book took Eugenides 9 years to finish. It is such an epic read, and each sentence packs a sensual punch. There are a handful of books that have left me this happy and disoriented...also incredibly sad to turn the last page.

It's worth noting that the narrator, Kristoffer Tabori, is one of the best voice actors I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. How good is he, you may ask? Audible.com only has a handful of weird books for which he is credited on. The selection seems to be limited to children's horror stories, funky sci-fi, and self-help books. Oh well, that's dedication. I hope the Tales from Lovecraft Middle School books are worth it, because guess who'll be listening to them here shortly.

As for the rest of my "Jumanji" books? I'm hoping to tackle a few more this year. The Time Traveler's Wife, Cold Mountain, Into the Woods, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are at the top of that pile. I can already hear you, dear friend. "You haven't read those yet? Whatsamatterwithya"? I know! I'm hopeful.

'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.

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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

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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

It’s only the beginning of the year, but unless a masterpiece of literature comes my way before the end of December, I think I can safely say that Middlesex is my best read of 2014. This book is good––so good, in fact, that I wish I could erase it from my memory in order to read it again for the first time!

Part family saga and part historical fiction, Middlesex is fascinating on so many levels and touches so many themes I would be hard-pressed to draw an exhaustive list of all of them: Greek and American history, Greek mythology, adventure, love, sex, gender identification, genetics, racial relations, human relations, introspection, self-analysis, sociology, ethnology… you name it; this book has it all. The characterization is downright flawless and the characters so real that by the end of the book you will feel as if you know them personally. As for the prose, it is to die for, a vintage of words meant to be sipped and enjoyed at length, though at times I couldn’t help but gulp it down like there was no tomorrow––it’s that good!

Some say Middlesex is a long book––and indeed it is a big, fat doorstop of a book––but don’t let that prevent you from reading it. When the writing is that good the pages just fly by.

OLIVIER DELAYE
Author of the SEBASTEN OF ATLANTIS series
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