About this title: Spanning eight decades, Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. Eugenides was named one of America's best young novelists by both "Granta" and "The New Yorker."
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9780374199692ISBN:0374199698
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9780747560234ISBN:0747560234
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780747561620ISBN:0747561621
Description: Good. Our aim is to create value for our customers through the provision of low cost, affordable products and an overall satisfying buying experience. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9780747560234ISBN:0747560234
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780747590088ISBN:0747590087
Description: Very Good. Very good, never read-books may have a tear, creasing, or other small defect. Generally, very good condition. No.1 BESTSELLERS-great prices, friendly customer service-usually dispatched within 24 hrs. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780747561620ISBN:0747561621
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780747561620ISBN:0747561621
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780747561620ISBN:0747561621
Description: Fine. Minor rubbing to edges and extremities, otherwise unread. Next working day dispatch from the UK. Please contact us with any queries. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9780747560234ISBN:0747560234
Description: Good. Our aim is to create value for our customers through the provision of low cost, affordable products and an overall satisfying buying experience. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Picador USA
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780312991739ISBN:0312991738
Description: Good. The pages of this book show discolouration due to age/shelf-life. Our books are dispatched from Bridgend, South Wales. Your Satisfaction Guarenteed. read more
Description: New in New jacket. Book. B Format. 'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license records my first name simply as Cal. ' So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel ... read more
Binding: Audio CD
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9781593977344ISBN:1593977344
Description: Good. Slight wear, mildew or coloring. May have minimal highlights or markings on some pages. Ships within 24 business hours from SC. Satisfaction Guaranteed! read more
""Why?" she kept crying softly, shaking her head..."Why did you run away, honey?" "I had to." "Don't you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?" I lifted my face and looked into my mother's eyes. And I told her: "This is the way I was."
Most people know that Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Middlesex" is the story of a girl who was "born twice"--first as a baby girl and later as a teenage boy. Our narrator was born with 5-alpha reductase deficiency, a genetic mutation leaving some affected individuals with ambiguous genitalia. As we journey with him through his happy childhood, and painful and confusing adolescence, his voice is endearing and his feelings, put to paper, are more familiar and universal than you might think.
Our narrator doesn't get to his own story until more than halfway into the book. The first half takes us back to his grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona, as they fall in love against the backdrop of the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey and flee to start a new life in America. Later we learn of his parents, Milton and Tessie, as they grow up and wed during an era of economic recession and race riots in Detroit. The homeplace that they buy and where our narrator spends his childhood is called "Middlesex", which I believe was meant to symbolize more than just a house. Its description is that of a country, a society re-defining its norms...
Though we had ruined it with our colonial furniture, it was still the beacon it was intended to be, a place with few interior walls, divested of the formalities of bourgeois life, a place designed for a new type of human being, who would inhabit a new world. I couldn't help feeling, of course, that the person was me, and all the others like me...
As these three generations gain and lose the "American Dream" time and time again, I was reminded how history seems to repeat itself. Life in suburbia and during a Recession in the 60's...war...strained race relations all sounded familiar, as these are some of the same problems facing modern Americans today. Will we ever evolve past some of these issues? Or will they always come around again, generation after generation?
The real star of this novel is the narrator and his voice--so I guess the true star is the brilliant writer Eugenides for this amazingly-written, endearing family saga. I have read several Pulitzer Prize winners that have left me untouched, however... I wish they could have given him this one twice."
""So, what's going on, wha hoppen, I don't understand, I thought we were giving this 5 stars?" "Yah, I thought maybe we would, early on, but we're not." "We're not? What's wrong? I thought you loved the book!" "I did! There's just--there's some problems in the later part. There's a structural problem, it affects the linearity, there's a broken-back feel once we shift to--" Oh you and your 'linear', always with the linear nonsense, don't be so male, there's more to life than a straight line or a clean beginning middle and end! This book is circular, and rounded at the free ends, and it has the freedom to flower in different directions, and try to be all-encompassing...y'know a little Gaia, a little chaos wouldn't hurt--" "Excuse me, I'll do the interrupting around here, if you don't mind. After all, this novel, amongst it's many laudable qualities, does throw out some pretty damning generalizations about male behaviour. For a book that deals with the danger of classifying things--" "Ha! Typical male behaviour! Classif--" "Excuse, would you let me interrupt please? Thank you..."
"Now, as I was saying, and more to the point than any quibbles I have about some minor male-bashing: I don't think we have a clean split, when the book seeks to transfer its attentions from Everyone Who Came Before Callie, to Callie herself, I mean when Callie becomes the main focus. That's the broken-back quality I'm talking about." "Listen!--" "Calm down." "No, listen--don't tell me to calm down, Mr. Logos is all!--the book wants to deal with Callie's extended family first, the ancestors, and how we get from point A to point B. I would think you would appreciate that line of succession approach, and it's beautiful! Because we care so much about the grandparents and their trials and how they find this shocking love, but they don't care about any genetic...repercussions or whatever." "Well, yes, that's my point, that's the bottom line here! Characters that are central to the story, and that we grow with, and invest in, well they're suddenly swept aside, and they have these odd background subplots, a few of which seem kind of hokey or outlandish just for shock effect--" ""Yes, but then we get Callie, as a result of all that is happened, and we needed to know how she got formed the way she is, and and and--" "The bottom line is--" "Let me finish! Her Greek roots are important too, I mean how can you NOT love the depth of the full story here. All you want is some teenage angst from some tortured soul who--well I don't know what I wanna say anymore, so what were you saying?"
"Look, the book has lots of emotional power all the way through, partly from the way characters do learn to adapt and kind of under-react or internalize their reactions. This is a strong family that adapts to some pretty strange and sometimes terrible stuff. I just felt that you can't build up characters the way the book does in the early-going so thoroughly, and then have them kind of hanging around in the background for the second half. There's something there that I never liked. Cool structural shifts are all well and good, but it seemed like...well, sometimes, like we were into another book. And it doesn't help that Callie is kind of the apex of adaptive behaviour. Interesting character--witty, great narrator, feeling more on the inside than she shows to the world, and all that, but, uh, again, maybe another thing that is double-edged is the choice to have a main character who is, able to conceal emotion so well. Add to that--"
"Waitaminute! Before you go adding to that, I think you're being unfair. We do see Callie get very emotional at certain crisis points, like when she really thinks she's a 'MONSTER', and at other times when she cries or is rejected, or--" "Yes, but that's all secret and internal and so forth. Once she's into a full struggle over her own identity, and the problems with defining it, uh, it's very run-and-hide. And that's fine, that's probably even normal. But, then, there the scenes, especially with family, where you might want to ratchet up the emotional factor and really bring things to the fore. I mean everybody seems so calm about everything all the time, and when they don't, they sneak off and cry, or if they can't do that, they just make jokes and be whimsical. Another crisis averted. It's a weird book that way. I liked it, but, huh, how do I say this without sounding like if I re-wrote it I could give it a better review..." "You do sound like that! You sound like 'If I wrote this scene there'd be a big argument and blah blah blah, this is how it should be and I'm a better writer than a Pulitzer-Prize winning veteran, blah blah blah'! That's how you sound right now!"
"Huh. Well you sound like a nag. Anyway, all I'm saying this: I don't, as a reader, always like to have my emotional reactions suppressed just when they're building up a head of steam, by the writer suppressing the emotional impact of a scene. We divert to humour, we divert to an infatuation, let's say--which, again, gives some great writing, and some great scenes--and then we're running away somewhere to avoid confrontation, or whatever, and then more and more the book is threatening to have a rushed ending, yer yer precious 'circle of life completed/Gaia rules" shindig or whatever--" "You're babbling. You don't usually babble. Don't you usually ream me for babbling?" "Look, okay. Thought organization time. Huh, okay. What is up with that goofy ransom money, slow-speed chase nonsense near the end, right when we should really be getting down deep into the characters' souls, or at least the main character's soul, since everyone else is kind of lingering on the outskirts. I really wasn't prepared for that whole pulp-novel, crime element that suddenly reared up. That didn't work for me at all! It didn't seem properly set up, for one thing, and the character who was after the money, uhhhh, didn't seem to have that side to his or her personality, before that. That really seemed like a writer reaching for potboiler sequence near the end. I mean, what do you say about that??"
"Welll, it wasn't my favourite part, but I don't think it was cheap. And it wasn't totally a surprise--I think that person who was doing bad things had been shown to be resentf--" "Oh, PLEASE!" "'Oh, PLEASE', yourself, Mountus Interruptus! Okay, so you hated the book then, maybe we should give it 1 star!" "Oh no, I loved it; I mean, I couldn't stop reading it. It's wild; it's brash and daring, and the writer fully commits to a design and has the guts to carry it off. And most of the stuff that I see as sabotage is probably the stuff that everyone else loves. It's--I'm--I'm just very structure-oriented. Or, I don't know. It's--It's like a beautiful waterfall that suddenly changes course a little too much for my aesthetic tastes. It felt truncated as we had to shift to Callie and her life, and all her running and internalizing. That, and a few oddball scenes that went for humour when I thought maybe we were gonna get down and dirty with the emotio--" "You've never been down and dirty in your life! You wouldn't know down and dirty if it--" "Alright, this review is over. Four stars, I'm dominant, you're recessive, I say 4 stars, enough's enough, go away.""
"This Greek family saga, as narrated by a hermaphrodite, has many pages, but I flicked through them easily like so many moistened labia. Moments of tragedy lay concealed within, like undescended testes, but warm humour dominated, swelling forth like a budding penis."
"I'll have to join the ranks of many of the other reviewers here and say I probably never would have read this book if it hadn't been chosen for my book club. I, too, thought the story would be a one dimensional search for gender identity--not so. I was hooked from the beginning. I would describe the story as one of an American family through generations--their journey just happened to produce a certain side effect compared to other families' journeys. Being just a few years younger than Cal I appreciated the nostalgic references to the cultural symbols, products, events, and fashions/styles of the day. I thought the author also chose an interesting omnicient narrative style (by Cal) for the story as well. I did have a couple of squirmy moments (the scenes with Dr. Luce really creeped me out). I only give it 4.5 stars simply because I would really have to know someone fairly well to recommend the book."
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