Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #982 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-05
• Released on: 2007-06-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Amazon.com
"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." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.

Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:

Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." … I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons

From Publishers Weekly
As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: "Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.' " The "me" of that sentence, "Cal" Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Eugenides spends the book's first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal's story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history, and Callie is left to think of her "crocus" as simply unusually long-until she reaches the age of 14. Eugenides, like Rick Moody, has an extraordinary sensitivity to the mores of our leafier suburbs, and Cal's gender confusion is blended with the story of her first love, Milton's growing political resentments and the general shedding of ethnic habits. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides's ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender. This is one determinedly literary novel that should also appeal to a large, general audience.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-From the opening paragraph, in which the narrator explains that he was "born twice," first as a baby girl in 1960, then as a teenage boy in 1974, readers are aware that Calliope Stephanides is a hermaphrodite. To explain his situation, Cal starts in 1922, when his grandparents came to America. In his role as the "prefetal narrator," he tells the love story of this couple, who are brother and sister; his parents are blood relatives as well. Then he tells his own story, which is that of a female child growing up in suburban Detroit with typical adolescent concerns. Callie, as he is known then, worries because she hasn't developed breasts or started menstruating; her facial hair is blamed on her ethnicity, and she and her mother go to get waxed together. She develops a passionate crush on her best girlfriend, "the Object," and consummates it in a manner both detached and steamy. Then an accident causes Callie to find out what she's been suspecting-she's not actually a girl. The story questions what it is that makes us who we are and concludes that one's inner essence stays the same, even in light of drastic outer changes. Mostly, the novel remains a universal narrative of a girl who's happy to grow up but hates having to leave her old self behind. Readers will love watching the narrator go from Callie to Cal, and witnessing all of the life experiences that get her there.
Jamie Watson, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Not Much to Laugh About in this Big, Fat Greek Tragedy
Middlesex is built on the recurring theme of familial relationships informed by war and mayhem. It's flush with history that's relevant to the characters' experiences and that brings a little reality to some unbelievable plot moments. The story idea is new - Calliope is the most entertaining gender-defiant person since Myra Breckinridge. Yes, there's a lot to like about this book. But, the lengthy, albeit well-researched medical science, makes for laborious reading. And, except for Calliope, the center of the story, the characters are pretty flat. Although the adult Cal tells much of the story from her (now his) childhood perspective, I never heard the child's voice. As in most real-life family situations, there is dark humor here; yet, there is too little laughter to take Middlesex beyond an awareness that it's fiction.

An astonishing novel.
This is not a novel of perversion, but one of explanation, family devotion, ethnic description, historical perspective, and truly BREATHTAKING writing.
It will be difficult to find a book to read after finishing this astonishing novel.
My other favorite book about sex, love and self help is:I Love You. Now What?: Falling in Love is a Mystery, Keeping It Isn't

very interesting story
This is a story about three generations of the Stephanides family. Told by a very interesting person Cal Stephanides.

The first generation is Cal's grandmother Desdemona Stephanides. She lives with her brother Lefty in a small town in Turkey that was traditionally Greek. She raises silk worms and he sells the silk in the nearby town. Their parents were killed earlier and they try to fight an attraction that they have to each other. When the Turks invade they decide to go to Smyrna then on to Athens and America to live with their cousin Lina. While in Smyrna they get stuck when the Turks set fire to the city. During this time Lefty asked Desdemona to marry him if they survive. They are able to get out by pretending that they are French and manage to get on a ship. On the ship they pretend that they do not know each other and eventually get married. They arrive in Detroit to live with their cousin Lina and her husband Jimmy Zizmo. While they live with the Zizmo's Lefty works for Henry Ford, gets drown into Jimmy's bootlegging schemes and both Lina and Desdemona get pregnant on the same night, and soon after the birth of Lina's baby daughter Jimmy disappears.

For the first couple years of Milton Stephanides and Theodora (Tessie) Zizmo's lives they are raised together in the same house. Then Lina and Tessie move nearby. As they grow up they are still close (Tessie calls Milton's sister Zoe her daughter at first and spends a lot of time with the family growing up) Then when they are teenagers they find themselves attracted to each other. Milton plays an instrument and uses it to seduce Tessie even though she is involved with Mike, a minister in training at the local Greek Orthodox seminary. Tessie and Mike get engaged and Milt is not happy, so he enlists in the navy during WWII. While Milt is serving Tessie realizes that she loves him and shortly afterward they get married.

Calliope Helen Stephanides was born about 15 years after "her" parents marriage and five years after th birth of her brother Chapter Eleven. She thinks herself a normal girl besides the practice kissing with a friend when she was in Elementary School and the girl she befriends whom she calls "The Object" as in the object of her affections. They spend a lot of time together the summer they are 14, and despite loosing her virginity to the objects brother commence on an affair. Shortly afterwards Callie is injured and the doctors find something fascinating. This leads Milt, Tessie and Callie to Dr. Lucas in NYC. What they find there is that Calliope is genetically a male, but is missing something on the fifth chromosome that makes him look like a female. After some miss understandings Callie becomes Cal and runs away leading to some very interesting adventures and experiences for the family.

All this is told by a 41 year old Cal, who is involved in the foreign service and lives in current day Germany.

A very well written interesting story that catches you from the very first sentence.