Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Middlesex: A Novel
Book Review: A gem of a book!
Summary: 5 Stars
In spite of the title I knew nothing about the subject of this book's until I started to read. I was very pleasantly surprised because I am very curious about rare medical conditions. The other aspect of the book that interested me was the origin of the grandparents in Anatolia at the end of the 1st world war. Louis de Bernieres wrote about the same era and the Greek exodus in Birds Without Wings (there was one in other direction simultaneously as Turks had to leave Greece and Greek islands) . Read one after the other, two books compliment each other and give a better historical context.
Anyway, I am still reading Middlesex, as slowly as I can, because it is one of those books when finished, will cause a withdrawal syndrome.
Book Review: A gender-bending Greek-American epic
Summary: 5 Stars
_Middlesex_ is a really fabulous book, and the voice of the protagonist/1st person omniscient (yes, I meant both) narrator is captivating throughout. Much of the story occurs before the narrator is even born, a la _Tristram Shandy_ (one of my favorite novels). But _Middlesex_ covers a whole spectrum of twentieth-century life from intersexuality to the immigrant experience (specifically Greek immigrants) to the founding of the Nation of Islam to incredibly complex extended family relationships to love/lust/desire to self-delusion and deliberate lies to the arrogance of certain members of the medical profession to self-discovery from many different angles.
It's not always a comfortable read for those who tend to see gender as a social construct more than a biologically essentialist reality, but it is an excellent reminder of the complexity of both sex *and* gender and that no one explanation for the causes of gender identity or sexual orientation can be generalized to apply to all individuals.
As a narrator, Cal is both wryly merciless and wryly sympathetic with his(?) earlier self and with the members of his family and the other characters, and even the most apparently stereotypical characters keep surprising us. A wonderful twentieth-century, multigenerational, Greek-American epic novel.
Book Review: A gene gender identy family saga to enjoy!
Summary: 4 Stars
This novel won the Pulitzer Prize but really caught my eye with its first sentence. "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl: and then again, as a teenage boy..." What a hook for a great narattor who tells his own gene history back to his grandparents growing up in Greece. Should not a great novel make you view the world through a different perspective? The family holds back a secret, which is not really all that secret in the narrative, but it's impact and the characters all seem to come alive and jump off the page. Eugenides tells the family saga with much humor and insight and for me the book only felt flat and somewhat long and stretched in "book three" where Calliope enters puberty and her (his) act of discovery happens oh so slowly. This section seems written in a completely different tone and with little humor. I would suggest some editing would have helped because the ending is triumphal. I recommend it, not the perfect novel it could have been, but so well written in parts and so entertaining that I know you will be also be recommending it to others.Book Review: A great achievement
Summary: 4 Stars
Jeffrey Eugenides' work is a real feast of a novel. It is at once hugely entertaining and fiendishly clever. Almost all obsessions of modern fiction are there - gender identity, self-reflectivity, the diaspora etc. - but Eugenides treats these issues in a wonderfully unobtrusive way and integrates them into a highly readable narrative. In fact, "Middlesex" is a real page-turner, with the bonus of sophistication. The constant shifts in narrative pace are masterful, the depiction of its characters (with the relative exception of the protagonist's brother) psychologically pervasive and warm-hearted. Only some two chapters towards the end of the novel are somewhat hyperbolic in action and do not match the otherwise delicate and subtle imagining of events and persons - this is no more than a minor fault, though, in a terrific read.Book Review: A great story - I liked the varied generations and locales
Summary: 5 Stars
I disagree with those who felt Eugenides should stick with the main character's life. It's an in-depth story, not just a book about a detective solving a case or someone falling in love with someone else. You can't start reading it with preconveived ideas about how it should go. I loved to read about how various characters' personalities evolved and why. I also wished that Eugenides would have elaborated on this or that, but if he had wrote more on what all of us wished, we'd all still be reading it. I can't imagine the time it took to research intersexuals, and the history and geography of Greece and Turkey during the 1920s. I understand the street knowledge of Detroit and Germany, since he's lived in both locations (I can vouch that's he's accurate for Detroit, since I live 1 and 1/2 hours north of Motown). It's so rare that an author is able to successfully develop an original idea in an untapped topic, but to also be such an entertaining storyteller is rarer still. I haven't read "The Virgin Suicides" yet, but I will. I also am looking forward to his third novel!