Middlesex

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars | 12,403 ratings

Price: 29.52

Last update: 01-05-2025


About this item

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. The breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Top reviews from the United States

  • David Adelman
    5.0 out of 5 stars A "small" epic, Beautifully written...
    Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2013
    Middlesex was my first exposure to the author. I say that as preface to establish that I was a blank slate at the time I read the work. Discovering Mr. Eugenides for me has been the most pleasant experience. This book, as anyone can discern for themselves by reading a synopsis - concerns itself with Calliope who becomes Cal, and more importantly the story of his (or her) family. The clumsiness of my ability to assign gender aside, which may or may not be be politic, this book is emphatically not about gender. Oh, that is not to say that the book does not touch upon the subject. My point is that the intersex subject matter is not the crux of the story, but rather of symbolic importance, a way to access the family history. At one point in the narrative, early on, the narrator even says that this is a genetic history, the story of a single gene through the generations.

    Thus we come to my titular description of a "small" epic. Although that is unfair. It would be more accurate to say that it is close, because it deals with one family, and yet that would be just as inaccurate in its own way. I would say instead that nearly every character, and certainly the family. is imbued with characteristics that deepen them; in effect, make them more real. There are exceptions of course; it is not a perfect work, but any imperfections for me were worth it for the actual experience that is the good in this book. Portions of this book, particularly the insight the author gives into our protagonist, is pure poetry. This will always be a major plus for me. Of course I was not expecting the same kind of treatment to extend to a geography, Detroit, but I could certainly handle it. Normally, I don't respond nearly so well to an author who takes on a space as muse, especially in this kind of narrative that has a depth-ness of both time and space, but again, for me it didn't detract. At worst, the long soliloquies about Detroit only slowed down the narrative. Of course as a reader, it is slightly irritating that ostensibly for the amount of time that is spent on it, the zeitgeist of Detroit is a character itself. However, I don't know how much of this is the novel itself, or simply the limitations of the genre. Any work that concerns itself heavily with the passage of history, has to deal with that history. For all of the beauty of the words then, this book is pragmatic in that sense.

    But, to reiterate. When this book is good, it's good. Like candy or cake melting on the tongue. We get to see the characters as the ultimate snapshots of humanity - in highs and lows and everything in-between. Most impressively, for all that this book clothes itself in allusions towards mythology and tragedy, all of this is done without pretension.
  • Brian Wallace
    4.0 out of 5 stars deserving of Multiple Readings
    Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2016
    I first read Middlesex in 2003. The book deserved and found a place on my library shelf, and the characters and the history they lived and wrought stayed with me. A few months ago a friend read the novel for the first time and shared thoughts on the book, so I took it off the shelf and re-read it with a more mature eye. Eugenides depicts generations of a Greek family displaced by war, transplanted to industrial America, challenged by economic catastrophe, buoyed by commitment to mindless work, and wracked by social, cultural, racial, and sexual upheaval in a novel of epic scope that documents the end of the age of princes and follows the rise and fall of industrial America. History, poetry, tragedy, and comedy fill the pages of Middlesex. History, tragedy, and comedy are the elements of story and plot on which other reviewers of this novel have commented, some with clear and incisive understanding, and others with opinions that suggests a preference for a facile rendering of a single character’s unusual personal development.

    The histories Eugenides presents, Kemal’s post World War I Turkey, American prohibition, and the mid-twentieth century labor and racial tensions which Detroit underwent, at that time the fifth most populous city in the country, provide a backdrop against which the reader can struggle to understand the choices made by individual characters.

    The story strikes an emotional depth, but for this reader the quality of Eugenides’ prose takes this work to a level worthy of the accolades it has received. Poetry. Eugenides uses lists and strong imagery to make his story an incontrovertible reality. In virtually every paragraph Eugenides invokes all the senses. It occurs to me that the sense of smell is perhaps the most primal, and the sense that stirs most our memories. For me, when water is poured on a camp or charcoal fire, immediately I am transported to 1965, Queens Street Station in Glasgow, Scotland. I am five years old, my mother is wearing a white faux fur coat and a gigantic black steam engine has just come to rest at the platform. Scent and memory. Eugenides uses the sense of smell to create texture and resonance in ways that few writers do. Some of the readers who have commented on this novel have complained that the intricacy and detail distracted them from the story. This reader would suggest that it is the attention that Eugenides pays to detail, the scents, the colors, the sounds and textures, his lists of observations, that lift this novel from story to art.
  • Todd M. Warren
    5.0 out of 5 stars A stunning original
    Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2024
    I’ve never read anything quite like this. I was swept into this strange story that starts in a Greek village in what’s now turkey, weaves through Detroit’s fall into hard times in the 60s and 70s, but above all tracks the story of a girl who turns out to be not exactly a boy, but a hermaphrodite. It’s so well written, with vivid characters.. and while it almost completely avoids politics and contemporary culture wars it’s also a gentle meditation on gender, ethnicity, sexuality and identity, unspooled in a terrific story.

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