Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Middlesex: A Novel
Book Review: A classic, the way a novel should be
Summary: 5 Stars
I don't write long reviews, so please don't take that for lack of enthusiasm for this book.If you like the works of John Irving, you should love this book. Like JI, Eugenides writes about a unique individual and his/her seemingly epic, yet very American, life. Chocked full of great local and international history (Detroit & Greece) and relics of 20th century Americana, this is a perfectly constructed novel. The narration style, plot construction, and the dialogue are all done masterly. While reading this, I felt like Callie was sitting across from me telling me the story of her family and how he came to be the way he is. I didn't however, feel this was "magic realism" at all. The story to me seemed very realistic and was done with a very accurate description of the proper history in the background. Read this book, its awesome.
Book Review: A delicate topic--terrific story
Summary: 5 Stars
A good story is always the basis for an award of 5 stars from me. This story swept me from the quiet Greek town, through the tumult of war, into the immigrant experience in Detroit. The family secret never revealed results in the narrator's unusual life journey from girlhood to manhood.Book Review: A feat of imaginative empathy
Summary: 4 Stars
One of the challenges faced by writers is that of making old stories seem new and strange again, and to make ordinary, universal experience seem extraordinary and particular. Jeffrey Eugendies' "Middlesex" is a perfect example of this: superficially, it is the unusual, quirky tale of a hermaphrodite, and yet it captures and illuminates the commonplace trails of growing up and sexual awakening with as much tenderness, accuracy and originality as you'll find in any contemporary coming-of-age novel.This might sound irrelevant, but I came away from this book not so much admiring Jeffrey Eugenides as liking him. "The Virgin Suicides" was a lovely, sad book, but this is far more ambitious - it's a hubristic idea that could have dissolved into a shallow vehicle for cleverness in another writer's hands, and it's a credit to Eugenides' warmth and charm that this doesn't. Eugenides is more interested in character and story than in the nature/nurture question the book inevitably raises; on this, he takes a rather safe middle ground, opting for the free will and self-determination argument. While this makes the book a little less interesting in terms of ideas, it makes it a better novel.
Eugendies' greatest assets are his offbeat altruism, his generosity, his humour, and his striking imagination. He knows how to entertain a reader, and he takes care of you throughout this sizeable read, confident that he's tapping a rich vein not only with Callie's tale of gender but with the background story of a Greek family across generations and recent American history captured via the prism of Detroit. But it is with Callie's early adolescence that this book really shines, especially in Eugenides' descriptions of her love affair with the Object - here is Eugenides' best prose, fertile, supple and evocative, clearly fired by its subject, and remarkably androgynous. While the book sags in certain parts, and occasionally falters in its own high-wire act (I found it sometimes a bit hard to picture Callie the Man after Callie the adolescent girl was so real; but then, that's forgivable, considering the enormous difficulty of such an undertaking), it's these passages that illuminate just what a feat of imaginative empathy Eugendies has achieved with "Middlesex." I'd recommend it to anyone.
Book Review: A great story with great characters
Summary: 5 Stars
This was a joy to read, and difficult to put down. At first I wasn't sure if I'd believe the different genders of our narrator, a man as an adult, and a girl as a child, but Eugenedides pulls it off very nicely. But what I really loved was the set up. The author takes us through 80 years of this family's history, and even without the hermaphrodite angle, this would be a great read. The characters are wonderful, and the immigrant story is great. I was sad to see the book end.Book Review: A hemaphorodite's family history
Summary: 4 Stars
More than just the memoir of a 41 year old hemaphrodite, Middlesex is his family's history, focusing on his grandparents, a brother and sister who married, passing on a gene that determined Calliope Stephanides fate. The story goes back to their native Greece and the civil strife that led the grandparents to America, where they settled in Detroit, whose own strife, racial riots in the 1960s, would help determine the family's fate. Callie grows up amidst all of it, a happy go lucky girl early in life who doesn't develop the way her friends do at adolesence, which is when things get interesting. The family goes to New York to see the world's foremost gender research doctor, who suggests hormones and minor surgery to restore Callie's feminity. But Callie calls him a liar and takes off, heading West to SF where she lives for awhile, displaying herself in a porn shop. In the end is a family reunion, the high point being a conversation with her grandmother, in her 80s and nearly gone, but lucid enough to admit the truth about her past, which sheds light on Cal's present. A fascinating and impressive book.