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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #324574 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Middlesex is a significantly more ambitious and much odder novel than Jeffrey Eugenides' resonant debut, The Virgin Suicides (on DVD), which was a bittersweet paean to adolescent love. This is a sprawling family saga, bursting with life, which spans three generations and crosses several continents. At its core, however, is another unorthodox but exquisite coming-of-age story.

The book's wily narrator and central character, Calliope Stephanides (named after the muse of epic poetry) is a hermaphrodite raised as a girl who comes to realise she is happier as a boy and is now living as a man in contemporary Berlin. Cal's tale begins, appropriately enough, in Greece (or more precisely Asia Minor)--an Aegean Strasbourg whose sovereignty is claimed by Greece and Turkey. In 1922 brother and sister Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides escaped their war-torn homeland and arrived, as man and wife, in Detroit, America. It is this coupling that ultimately begets their grandchild Calliope and her ambiguous sexuality, as she, or rather by then he, sanguinely notes:

Some people inherit houses; others painting or highly insured violin bows. Still others get Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.

As Cal recounts the experiences of the Stephanides clan in their new land--from the Depression to Nixon--he unfurls his own symbiotic odyssey to a new sex. Cal's narrative voice is arch, humorous and self aware, continually drawing attention to its authorial sleights of hand, but never exasperating. This is big, brainy novel--The Oracle of Delphi puts in an unlikely appearance in the middle of a teenage tryst--but one full of compassion. Eugenides' astonishingly rich story persistently engages the heart as well as the mind. --Travis Elborough

Sainsbury's Magazine, October 2002
"Full of wit and weird happenings, this book just gets better with every chapter."

Time Out, October 2nd 2002
"novels as good as this aren't published very often."

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Customer Reviews

Breathless with wonder
It is difficult to praise this book too much. Its ambition is obvious from its length and its multiple themes, the Greek diaspora, the American Dream and its racial divide, hermaphroditism, the sexual revolution, evolutionary biology....However, what I would not have thought possible was that this ambition be realised with such deftness of touch. There is not a dud paragraph in its 500-odd pages, and I imagine that my problem with the odd sentence was more to do with my lack of familiarity with the American idiom than with any failing on the part of the author. But these hiccups, rather than discouraging me, only made me more eager to to see what followed. At the end I was breathless with wonder. Would I read a better novel? Do we have to wait 9 years for his next?

If you read one book this autumn...
...make it Middlesex. A truly compelling novel about incest, Greek history, the American Dream and hermaphroditism, the story is enchanting from the very first page. Intellectual, but not intimidating, funny, but never punny, this is a book as deep as it is long. The author, Jeffrey Eugenides, writes in such a guileless, uncynical and effortless way that you fall in love with his characters and find yourself understanding and accepting their sometimes morally dubious decisions.

In the central figure of Calliope Stephanides he has created a character as iconic as Holden Caulfield - a character who could equally become a byword for teenage alienation (although obviously a slightly more tongue-twisting one). The story Cal tells is as memorable as Salinger's opus and will stay with you well past the final page. This book is an almost guaranteed classic, and as such well worth buying in hardback and treating very carefully...

Another Eugenides masterpiece
Here is a man who knows how to tell a story.
The Virgin Suicides was a masterpiece to the point that I almost believed that it was based on real life. Such a convincing and absorbing style! Middlesex is a masterpiece treated like the building of an enduring architectural beauty. The foundations are laid and initially, you don't really know what it's going to be. And slowly, as it unfolds, the plot thickens and you find yourself on the edge of your seat and asking 'will they find out? do they know already?' and you are reading faster and faster and you just want to find out what's happening next... I had to pace myself with this because it was so difficult to put it down. This was certainly addictive.
The theme deals with a Greek-American hermaphrodite's view of the world from childhood to adolescence to adulthood and the journey taken. Eugenides paints the reflections, tension, confusion, joy and despair of this person with deeply sympathetic brushstrokes. And all of this is done against a touchingly poignant but honest portrayal of a Greek background. This, like the Virgin Suicides, just feels like a real story and an actual account of a person's life...
I am waiting with bated breath for the next Eugenides rollercoaster!