He also had the tendency to not only marginalize the previous characters, but to demonize them in some fashion. The generational structure, which was necessary, because it showed how Callie became Cal, had the downside of me growing to really care about a character only to have Eugenides speed up the narrative and push them aside for the newer character to take the stage.

Middlesex is really at least six books in one memoir, historical fiction, romance, coming of age, disillusioned youth, drifter in the vein of Holden Caulfield, and finally a weird John Waters Midnight Cowboy camp mash-up worthy of David Lynch. Yet, while enjoying the read, I never really felt that invested in the book or that enamoured of the characters. It's really well written, thought provoking, and an interesting and daring subject (hello again incest! You thought I was going to say hermaphrodite didn't you?), and literally made for book club dissection, which I will be doing. I can see why this book won the Pulitzer. Is it genes that make us, environment, or something else entirely? Is it our choice? Male and female, Greek and American, child and adult. Spanning generations, the book shows how hard it is to live between two worlds. These two children will one day be Cal's parents. Lina likes the girls rather more than the boys, so is quite shocked when she and Desdemona both become pregnant, damn that arousing play they went to see. Resettling in Detroit, they started a new life with their cousin Lina and her husband of convenience Zizmo. It was a very small village they came from, a village where sometimes, babies where born who where neither one thing or another.

They also fled the fact that they where siblings, as well as third cousins. They fled Greece in the onslaught of the Turkish. Desdemona and her brother Lefty, his paternal grandparents. How was he formed? What where the confluence of genes that led to him. Yet, to tell his tale, we must travel back in time. The fact that being a hermaphrodite, while he has male genes, being raised female, has influenced him greatly, but not as greatly as he told the eminent Dr. There was just a fluke of genes and a lack of knowledge. There was no surgery, there was no accident.

Book Review - Gail Carriger's Etiquette and EspionageĬal was born Callie.

Book Review - Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

Book Review - Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex.

Book Review - Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.

Book Review - Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Liv.

Middlesex eugenides review