Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Middlesex: A Novel
Book Review: should be required reading
Summary: 5 Stars
This book should be required reading for high school students. It reads like a true autobiography. You feel like the characters in the novel are actually people you know. You will wish you had a better sense of your own family's history.Book Review: so good it should be sold with a money back guarantee...
Summary: 5 Stars
Middlesex is a mammoth, breathlessly good novel. Don't let the main theme (about a Greek-American hermaphrodite and her family) make you think this is some exploitative trash. On the contrary it is a warm, compassionate story full of life. And the characters are portrayed so well you'll wish Jeffrey Eugenides would write your life story.Caveats? Bad points? No. None. Zero. This book took the author nine years to write and it shows. It easily eclipses his first book (The Virgin Suicides) in terms of scope and quality, which is quite a feat (I enjoyed The Virgin Suicides very much).
Bottom line: a book 500+ pages in length that makes you cry out for more. I hope Eugenides is already working on his next book.
Book Review: utter trash
Summary: 1 Stars
Cloying, smarmy, not nearly as well-written as it thinks it is - nothing but tabloid titillation wrapped up in high-art pretension. Embarrassingly bad. Go read Manuel Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nikolas Katzankis, or just admit you want to read trash and pick up some Anne Rice. This in-between garbage that takes itself so seriously will give you a bad mental state for several days. I feel guilty for even finishing this book, I disliked it so much.Book Review: very different from The Virgin Suicides... and very good!
Summary: 5 Stars
The moment I saw this book, I knew I had to have it. Very few books are worth the steep price of today's hardcovers, but this is definitly one of them.I read Jeffrey Eugenidies' first novel, _The Virgin Suicides_, a few years ago and loved it. It is written in lyrical, sparse prose that abosolutely floored me with its beauty. In fact, it read almost more like a long, hypnotic poem than a novel. _Middlesex_ is very different. Although it certainly has moments in which the beauty of the prose is overwhelming, it contains a much more developed story than _The Virgin Suicides_. It is a big, ambitious novel that spans three generations and two continents.
I don't want to be one of those reviewers that rehashes the plot in her review, but I will say that in this novel you will find several fascinating settings (including Smyrna at the time of the Turkish invasion and Detroit during the 1960s race riots) and many unforgettable characters. However, what is really important about this novel is it's hermaphroditic (or intersexed) narrator, a modern-day Tiresius. Eugenides makes his narrator interesting and sympathetic and (thank goodness) does not fall into essentialst notions of what it means to be male or female. Calliopie/Cal, the narrator is unique and human. Eugenides manages to say a great deal about gender without falling into the trap of picking a side in the "nature vs. nurture" debate. He recognizes that BOTH genetics and upbringing have a role in making us who we are, and yet who we are somehow transcends both of these things.
_Middlesex_ is intellegent and complex and at the same time highly readable. Above all, in today's market of cookie-cutter all-American novels, it is extrordinarily unique.
Book Review: wonderful
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm not a great literary critic. In fact, I don't think I've ever even tried to review a book before. So, I don't feel up to the task of priasing this novel in flowery prose. In fact, attempting to do so seems silly. It is just a wonderful, remarkable and memorable book. It is the kind of book that I keep liking more and more in retrospect. I keep remembering different passages and saying to myself, "was that also in Middlesex?" Sometimes it seems like I read 5 different books, but no they're all part of this one wild, funny, interesting, mysterious, sad, heart-wrenching story. "I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me." Trite, but true.