Middlesex (2002)

emo girl finds out he is actually a boy: or, my big fat greek crocus.

I love the style of writing this author uses. It's a little bit humorous and touching both without being too much of either. The entire story kept my attention. I didn't want to put it down to do real life things. So much of it was unexpected to me. It follows a family from Greece to America. The main character is intersex. She was thought to be a girl until puberty when her male side started showing more. There's so much knowledge here and so much made up story too. About everything not just about Cal. I really, really enjoyed it. Some subject matter may be off putting to some readers. It isn't supper graphic or obscene at all, but I don't think it's for everyone. ( )

Like the hermaphrodite narrator of Middlesex, my first copy of this novel had extra "body parts," although in my book's case it's duplicative sets of pages 85 through 116, rather than male and female anatomy. The first set was physically in a place it wasn't supposed to be (immediately after page 52), but unlike the narrator's extra parts, my book's deformity didn't cause dysphoria and was easily replaced by a new, sequentially correct copy.*

It seems not merely ironic but somehow appropriate that my book was born malformed. As the half-star rating indicates, I didn't care for this book (when will I learn to stick to my rule not to read Pulitzer Prize winning books published after 1998?). Part of my dislike stems from the books organizational style: choppy blocks of narrative, some short as commercials, others the length of documentaries, that alternate between the narrator's family story and her/his present day life, which never becomes germane to the story (more on that later).

Some of my dislike stems from the unending procession of dysfunction in the plot. A Greek brother and sister marry and have two children, then hide their lineage from everyone until the end of the novel (which is supposedly the big reveal). The son from this incestuous relationship marries his cousin; together they have Calliope, the hermaphrodite narrator of the novel. As a result, Calliope's first cousin twice-removed is also her/his grandmother, her/his father is also his parents' nephew and her/his brother is also her/his third cousin. All this nonsense to rationalize the origins of Calliope's genetic deformity.

Primarily, though, I simply dislike the piling on of pointless details that turned what might have been an interesting 200-or-so page story into a 529 page slog. There's a three-hundred word description of the implausible effects from a woman fanning herself on household dust and a passing car. There's a fourteen-year-old runaway in a bus stop walking past a group of priests and magically knowing they are from Sri Lanka, a fact which has zero bearing on the story (if this complaint seems trivial, know that this scene occurred late in the novel when I was suffering severe overload). Here's the same girl earlier, describing herself hiding on the school toilet: "In the basement bathroom was a time frame I felt much more comfortable with, not the rat race of the school upstairs but the slow, evolutionary progress of the earth, of its plant and animal life forming out of the generative, primeval mud." Only an author trying to elevate a meaningless event into cosmic revelation writes that sentence. And most frustratingly, that garbage precedes a perfectly believable scene of the girl's parents lying in bed worrying about her.

I have wondered in other reviews how the novel in question merited a Pulitzer, after reading it through in hope of answering that question by the time I'm done. This novel is no different. Early in the book, Calliope pees on the priest performing her baptism, and we are led to believe the urine stream is capable of traveling the miraculous distance it does because she has a penis. Later, however, we learn that her penis has no opening, that her urine comes out from underneath it. Even in a book as fantastical as Middlesex, such an inconsistency shouldn't exist, not in a Pulitzer Prize winning book.

Jeffrey Eugenides, the author, is undoubtedly imaginative and has talent. I read that it took him nine years to finish this novel. My guess is that he spent the first eight on Calliope's heritage, because the novel's conclusion, where she/he finally comes center stage and becomes Cal, feels rushed and incomplete in comparison to the time spent building to the transformation.

* - I do wonder whether the previous owner abandoned the book before discovering its defect, thus innocently inflicting it upon me, or sold it after discovery, thus maliciously inflicting it on me for the two or three dollars they got from Half Price Books. Unfortunately I will just have to wonder. ( )

Quanto è difficile recensire questo romanzo! Quando l'ho chiuso tutto mi era perfettamente chiaro, sapevo cosa scrivere: le emozioni che avevo provato nella lettura erano esposte davanti a me come tanti quadri in una galleria d'arte. Ora però è diverso: ogni volta che cerco di descrivere cosa ho provato durante la lettura, mi accorgo che saltano fuori sempre nuovi dettagli che portano con loro nuove emozioni, nuovi occhi con cui guardare questo straordinario romanzo e che a loro volta svelano particolari che alla prima lettura non avevo colto. E' in questo modo che, recensire questo libro, si è trasformato per me in un intricatissimo labirinto.
Eppure questa rete di suggestioni, queste immagini cosi ricche di echi sono supportate da una narrazione di rara chiarezza e tutt'altro che difficile da usufruire.
Eugenides è un narratore di classe, che non ha bisogno di stupire con effetti speciali e il suo tono colloquiale e brillante è ampiamente sufficiente per aprire interi oceani emotivi nell'animo del lettore.
Davanti agli occhi lettore si dispiega, così, senza intoppi, una storia che riesce ad essere allo stesso tempo epica e personale che, attraverso le vicende della famiglia Stephanides e la voce del suo membro più "particolare", Calliope altrimenti detta "Cal", ci insegna una lezione fondamentale: l'unica via per salvarci è contrapporre ad un sistema che impone uniformità e omologazione, la nostra storia e la nostra irriducibile "specialità".
( )

Beautiful book about identity and how we find out who we are, both from a sex/gender angle and what country immigrants belong to. They style is very interesting, quite humorous, and the narrative is able to create all sorts of emotions in this family history that culminates in the narrator's story. Definitely worth reading. ( )