This is a book about transition.
Transition from child to adult to parent and grandparent.
From native to immigrant.
From brother and sister to husband and wife.
From rural dweller to urbanite.
From modest affluence to poverty and up again.
From loving language to losing the power of speech.
From geek to hippie.
From war through peace to civil unrest.
From belief to unbelief.
From rescued to rescuer.
From moral probity to corruption and crime.
Oh, and one character transitions from female to male.

The last of those is the book's USP, but don't let that fool you: it's no more limited to those with niche interests in intersex conditions than it's limited to those of Greek heritage. It is an unusual story, but with universal themes, told by a wonderfully engaging, lyrical, narrator.

Few of us fit neatly into binary categories. We all go through many transitions in our lives; the final one is "only another kind of emigration". This book speaks to everyone, not just those like Cal's family who "have always had a knack for self-transformation".

Plot
The family originally raised silkworms, so metamorphosis and long threads are at the heart of their lives as well as the story.

No fear of spoilers: the key aspects are summarised in the opening paragraphs, starting with: "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl... and then again, as a teenage boy." The rest of the book brings two strands together: Cal's grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona, fleeing the Turks in 1922 as siblings, and arriving in the US as husband and wife, and how that meant Cal ended up with a recessive intersex condition, and is now telling his story. He sometimes addresses the reader directly (shout outs to deus ex machina, Checkov's gun etc).

In many respects, it is a conventional sweeping family drama, of the ups and downs of the American Dream: building (and rebuilding) businesses against the backdrop of the Vietnam war and civil rights movement, but with an extra dose of teen angst about puberty (or lack thereof).

However, the final few chapters strike an oddly different tone. Octopussy's Garden is partly to hammer home the parallels with Greek mythology (and echo a passage in the middle where Cal muses on the transformations of puberty, using sea creatures as an analogy), but the final intrigue and chase felt very off-key, compared with the rest of the book.

There is also "an innate female circularity to the story", perhaps because Greeks believe "that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you began." This is compounded by some reversal (like Amis's execrable "Time's Arrow"): in old age, Lefty's mind and memories go into reverse, and in an early section, Cal describes his birth like a film on rewind.

Destiny: The Known and Unknown
Cal is omniscient, not just when he remembers things he wouldn't be able to recall (including being a foetus), but also in terms of how much he knows about other people's inner thoughts and private actions. On a few occasions, it feels a little weird (the erotic significance of the grandmother's corset, for instance), but it's how he makes the more extraordinary aspects of the plot credible: he has already conjured believable characters the reader cares about.

Nevertheless, the lack of knowledge often displayed is staggering - yet just about plausible. The most significant examples are that Desdemona and Lefty get away with their relationship, and that no one realises Calliope (as he originally is) is not a girl. There are others, though, such as teenage fumblings and more, at which point Cal "clearly understood that I wasn't a girl but something in between", though the boy involved did not.

Some of the ignorance is cultivated. When Desdemona and Lefty fake a courtship on the boat, "Lefty never discouraged any speculation. He seized the opportunity of transatlantic travel to reinvent himself... Aware that whatever happened now would become the truth... Playing out this imaginary flirtation... they began to believe it... it wasn't other travellers they were trying to convince; it was themselves."

Forgetting also matters: "Everything about Middlesex [the house] spoke of forgetting and everything about Desdemona made plain the inescapability of forgetting."

There are echoes of Greek mythology throughout, which gives a certain weight and tone to how Cal tells it. For instance, "An infinite number of possible selves crowded the threshold" as Cal's parents prepare to conceive him, and it's no coincidence that his childhood church was the Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, and that they later move to Middlesex Boulevard. It also creates an additional layer of foreshadowing. Cal's father is conceived after his parents see a play about a hybrid monster, and at a significant medical appointment about Cal, Milton (Cal's father) wears traditional Tragedy and Comedy masks as cufflinks: which way will it go?

Sex
Sexual identity is key. Desdemona is obsessed with predicting the sex of unborn children, and Cal himself was only conceived because his parents really wanted a girl (they already had a son) and believed they had found a way to improve the odds of that.

He was born at the women's hospital and "It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts." Nothing unusual was noticed by the elderly doctor, so "Five minutes old, and already the themes of my life - chance and sex - announced themselves."

There is relatively little about Cal's adaptation to living as a man (though there is a sweet sideline in learning how to date women, the perils of what to tell them when etc). Most of the story leads up to that realization: the agonies of not developing when her friends do, then growing oddly tall and awkward, struggling with infatuation with girls etc. However, there are glimpses of the adult issues: "I'm not androgynous... when Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment... It's a little like being possessed. Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe... But then, just as suddenly, she is leaving, shrinking and melting away inside me". Cal is currently in Berlin and "This once-divided city reminds me of myself." A childhood trip to Cyprus was cancelled by annexation "Cyprus was being cut in half... like all the other places in the world that were no longer one thing or the other."

It is incest that causes Cal's condition, but there is no rancour in the telling of the story, perhaps because it's not just Desdemona and Lefty. Other cousins married each other (Cal's parents are cousins, conceived on the same day, who grew up together), and even some couples who are not related by blood have a rather incestuous aspect: a much older husband who treats his wife - in some ways - like a daughter; an engaged couple who split, only for the spurned man to marry the sister of her new boyfriend; one sibling suggesting another experiment with masturbation; a first sexual encounter with a best friend's brother, followed by intimacy with the friend. But none of it's salacious.

A quiet irony is that the English test at Ellis Island is about eunuchs.

Desdeomona
Cal's grandmother is central to the book. In many ways they have very contrasting lives, but there are surprising parallels too. After an initial coldness, there is a special bond between them: Desdemona disapproved of Milton and Tessie marrying, of trying to choose their sex of the baby, and was then upset when her prediction of a boy was wrong. However, she was quickly won over, at which point, Cal "gave Desdemona back her original sin".

She had been an innocent village girl, surprised by developments of her own body as well as her heart (and that of her brother). Her "body was a constant embarrassment to her. It was always announcing itself in ways she didn't want to sanction...[her] body was still a stranger to its owner", which applies just as much to Cal.

Similarly, just as Desdemona had to reinvent herself as wife instead of sister, and forge an identity in a new country, Callie becomes Cal, "Like a stroke victim [as Lefty was], I was having to learn all the most simple skills" and "I was like an immigrant" to the world of men.

Diagnosis and Treatment: What Determines Gender?
"From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn't do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me."

Gender is not always clearcut, "determined by a variety of influences: chromosomal sex; gonadal sex; hormones; internal genital structures; external genitals; and, most important, the sex of rearing." The last is the belief of the doctor, who saw it as "like a native tongue... imprinted in the brain during childhood." Cal, raised as a girl, proves otherwise.

Cal's father looks to medicine to "fix" her problem, and both parents react differently: "Milton heard the words that were there. He heard 'treatment' and 'effective'. Tessie, on the other hand, heard the words that weren't there. The doctor hadn't said my name... He hadn't said 'daughter' either. He didn't use any pronouns." Cal is left "poised between the print of genetics and the White Out of surgery." But "we're all made up of many parts."

Controversy: Appropriateness and Sensitivity
Some question Eugenides' right to write a book like this. He is Greek-American, but does not have any intersex condition and is not a trans person. Furthermore, Cal (and his doctors) uses the term "hermaphrodite", which many find offensive when applied to people.

As a straight cis woman, with no medical background, I guess I am not really in a position to defend against such criticisms. Nevertheless, I think those who actually read it would find it hard to take offence at the sensitive and insightful way this aspect is portrayed.

As for the H word, I expect it's what doctors in the 1960s would have used and there are still places where 5-Alpha-Reductase Deficiency is described in such terms. Eugenides has said: "The story of Hermaphroditus, the beautiful son of Hermes and Aphrodite, is one I retell, in modern guise, in two different sections of the book." and "I'm referring not to a person or a group of people but to a literary character." (From http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/M...)

For me, one of the bigger issues is the focus of mid-teen Cal's desires, "The Obscure Object". Calling a girl or woman an object can't be good, can it? Yet it doesn't come across as objectifying in the usual sense. It's more a way of preserving anonymity and distance, reflecting her special, idolised, position in Cal's life. More troubling is the the issue of consent. If one partner is apparently asleep but enjoying things, and the pattern is repeated over many nights, is that OK? As a plain question, I'd say not, but the way it's described, I'm inclined to sit firmly on the fence.
Another tricky aspect is the exploitation (or not) of sex workers; even if it's dressed up as empowerment, I'm not convinced it is.

Chapter Eleven
Cal's brother is only ever referred to as Chapter Eleven (a US statute relating to business bankruptcy); we never learn his real name. This is different from some other characters who are referred to by a nickname, but whose real names are stated.

Quotes
* "His shortness had a charitable aspect to it."
* "A sick person imprisoned in a healthy body."
* "She'd spend a decade in bed trying with vitality to die."
* "You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by their face. Immigration ended that. next... footwear. Globalization ended that."
* "Sparks fly across the city, inseminating every place they land with a germ of fire."
* "Motorcars parked like giant beetles... smokestacks rose everywhere, cannons bombarding the atmosphere... stacks in regimental rows or all alone puffing meditatively away."
* The Ford factory, "that controlled Vesuvius of chutes, tubes, ladders, catwalks, fire, and smoke known, like a plague or a monarch, only by a color: 'The Rouge'."
* African-American area of Detroit in the 50s, "The gloom of front porches and apartments without electricity seeped out into the streets and the thundercloud of poverty... directed attention... toward... forlorn, shadowless objects."
* Joining the Nation of Islam, "Women exchange the maids' uniforms of subservience for the white chadors of emancipation."
* "A group of boys whose main bond was their unpopularity."
* "There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich."
* "In the cedar swamp, verticality wasn't an essential property of trees... everywhere the grey skeletons of trees."
* Tranquillizers provide "a kind of viewing platform from which she could observe her anxiety."
* "San Francisco, that cold, identity-cleansing mist."


Apparently German is bad for conversation because the verb is at the end of the sentence, which means you can't interrupt (wouldn't that make it good?)!

.............................................

Review from 2008

Pulitzer prize winning story of a Greek-American hermaphrodite! Evokes sympathy for the most unlikely things (incest) and plausibly documents Callie/Cal's coming to terms with growing up and then discovering her/his true nature. When telling the family history, Cal sometimes uses the first person, and sometimes her/his name at the time, paralleling her/his feelings of empathy or detachment. Although close to her/his family in some ways, s/he more often refers to them by name (Milton, Tessie) than relationship (father, mother). Takes a slightly unexpected turn towards the end.

This book has bits of stardust, hints of real brilliance. Yet, on the other hand, it is almost too much of a good thing.

I’m a sucker for a good opening line, and Eugenides delivers:
“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 Petosky, Michigan.”

Yay! That’s one intriguing opening first line. It has my attention!

Middlesex is also largely set in my home state of Michigan, and the author seems to nail most of the details (although the audiobook narrator did mispronounce Gratiot).

The narrative voice is simply incredible -- extraordinarily original and riveting.

However, this book is far, far too long. The plot is all over the place focusing on grandparents from Greece, three generations of family, The Great Depression, the Detroit Riots, and more. There are so many minor sub-plots and characters that nothing really sang—nothing really stood out as memorable. Characters are largely dropped for huge sections of the book, only to reappear briefly or not at all.

Some parts of the book just dragged. For example, Milton has three insurance policies for his business, and times are tough. Then, the Detroit Riots begin. Gee….what do you think will happen? Alright, just get there already!

Eugenides is clearly dripping with talent, but his gift hasn’t been sufficiently harnessed yet. This book feels like he is standing on the cliff of greatness, but he hasn’t gone over the edge yet, but he is right there. I really wanted to like this book more than I did.

Looking forward to Eugenides’s next book. Hopefully, not an epic the next time.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $10.67 through Pango
Audiobook – Free through Libby

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Cinco estrelas, desde a primeira à última página...

Tudo o que eu queria dizer sobre este livro a Ana já disse n  AQUIn. E di-lo de uma forma tão bonita como eu nunca conseguirei. E juro que tentei...
Desculpa Ana, por te "roubar" a review, mas Middlesex compensa o "crime".

Το Middlesex θα μπορούσε εύκολα να γίνει δυσβάσταχτο στην ανάγνωση τύπου Λίγη Ζωή ή ακόμα μία πανάλαφρη αρλούμπα για την ιστορία 3 γενεών με πολλοστή αναφορά στην έρημη μικρασιατική καταστροφή (δεν θα αναφέρω βιβλία, αλλά νομίζω πιάσατε το νόημα).
Το γεγονός ότι ισορροπεί στην εντέλεια ανάμεσα σε αυτές τις παγίδες αναπτύσσοντας έναν τόσο δύσκολο χαρακτήρα με αξιοζήλευτο τρόπο, είναι αυτό που το κάνει αριστούργημα.

When the Turks invade Smyrna, two Greeks, Lefty and her sister Desdemona, embark for America with their little baggage and a recessive chromosome, waiting patiently to wake up. The circumstances are favorable since Lefty and Desdemona profit from landing in an unknown land to live their forbidden passion and marry. Their son marries his cousin. The little Calliope is born, a girl for everyone, although having the gonads of both sexes.
The novel is divided into two main parts: the first tells the story of the emigration of the Stephanides family to the United States and the adventures accompanying it: the rise of Ford and the assembly line, prohibition, illegal bars, and riots in Detroit due to racial discrimination.
The second part deals with hermaphroditism and Calliope's difficulty in understanding a body that continually sends him contradictory signals. The opportunity for me to learn a little about intersex is not so rare that it (from 1 to 15 people in 1000 involved) is treated until there is a minor amputation.
Eugenides offers us a beautiful journey of almost a century, oscillating between the story with a big H and the tribulations of a family carried away by these events without boring us for a single second.

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.

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

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

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

I'd heard Middlesex was about a character who was born intersex and raised as a girl - a compelling enough premise on its own - but I didn't realize this book was a rich, complex family drama, spanning multiple generations and featuring heavy subjects like incest, immigration, family secrets and twentieth-century America.

It seems some readers were disappointed about this and wanted more from our protagonist and narrator, but I honestly love these kind of stories. So many characters came in and out of this novel, and were in turns likeable, deserving of sympathy, annoying and downright insufferable (but kind of in a good way). I love it when authors create such well-drawn individuals who feel so completely real and alive - it makes me far more invested in their stories.

And there is so much going on here. We are taken on a journey of familial (and genetic) history, from a small Greek village to Detroit (prohibition, race riots and many cultural changes) to suburban Michigan. Eugenides allows Cal to explore his identity and come to terms with who he is by taking his story way back to the beginning. Back before he questioned his gender; back before he was even conceived.

I actually quite liked the idea that a person has been years in the making long before they're born. That our stories begin way before us in far off lands, in communities and societies that are foreign to us. Not to get too cheesy, but there's something pleasantly overwhelming about novels that make me feel small amid the vast expanse of the universe.

I really liked it. I liked the science. I liked the history. And I really liked the novel's humanity - all these unforgettable characters each having an important part to play in the story of Calliope "Cal" Stephanides.

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

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

2015 read; 2013 read

I'm torn on this book. On the one hand, I loved the story, which is, as another reviewer put it, 'the greatest, most incestuous Greek epic since the Iliad'. On the other hand, I had serious problems with some of the writing. I haven't seen my quibbles mentioned anywhere else, so I guess I'm alone on them. Or am I?

In a nutshell, Middlesex is the story of Cal, a Greek American who was born a hermaphrodite and raised as a girl before finally realising he was boy as a teenager. In about five hundred occasionally brilliant pages, Cal traces back his family history (which is rife with inbreeding) to see how he came to be the sort of almost-male he is. In so doing, he not only paints a loving picture of the memorable and colourful Stephanides clan, whose men have rather special ways of wooing women, but of a changing world, all the way from the Greek part of early-twentieth-century Turkey through mid-twentieth-century Detroit to post-Wall Berlin. What with its focus on different conflicts in different eras, the book is quite epic in scope. Yet it is also quite personal, with the social and racial conflicts played out in the world at large reflecting the much more private conflict that is going on within Cal. Both the epic and the intimate aspects of the novel are funny, poignant and tragic, and for that Jeffrey Eugenides deserves applause. Lots of it.

But. But. But.

I have to admit to finding Eugenides an awfully inconsistent writer. While he undeniably has a flair for story-telling, he also has a mad tendency to change tenses and perspectives, to the point where it actually quite took me out of the story. I dislike stories which switch back and forth between past tense and present tense within a matter of paragraphs at the best of times; if these stories also come equipped with narrators who constantly switch points of view, I get annoyed. And this is exactly what happens in Middlesex. Not only is Cal an omniscient first-person narrator who shares with the reader details from older relatives' lives which he has no way of knowing, but he also has a maddening tendency to randomly refer to himself in the third person, which results in sudden bursts of 'Calliope this' and 'Calliope that' in what is essentially a first-person narrative. To a certain extent, I can see why Cal would do this, looking back from a distance at a person he used to be but no longer is, but still, I found it annoying, so much so that I occasionally found myself wanting to scream at the narrator to drop all that third-person shit and stick with the first person, for God's sake. I don't like feeling like shouting at narrators, so that's where one star went. The other one I deducted for the weak ending, which felt rather rushed to me after the perfectly lavish set-up. Is it me, or would Middlesex have been a better book with slightly more information on what happened to Cal between the ages of 17 and 41? With an actual, you know, ending and all that?

I'll stop complaining here to end on a positive note. Despite my quibbles, I enjoyed most of Middlesex -- especially the first half, which is superb. I quite like Eugenides' brand of modern mythology, so I think I'll give The Virgin Suicides a shot, too. I rather liked the film, so I'm actually quite surprised I haven't read the book yet...

What a big pile of everything this is!

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

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

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

If you're the type of person who covers your eyes as you watch a sex scene in a movie, this may not be the book for you. Some of the lovin' here is graphic and unconventional, and it's easy to squirm around in discomfort.

But, if you love good storytelling, great storytelling, you may be willing to overlook a few less than ideal feelings in your intestines.

Eugenides is an exceptional writer, and I marveled at some of his images. His writing is fresh and different and inviting. But, more than anything else, he is, at his core, a brilliant storyteller.

I could not turn away from this multi-generational account of a family of Greek immigrants and their unusual trajectory that leads to Cal, the damaged but lovable protagonist.

I won't be forgetting this story any time soon.