Skip to main content

Review: Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

A witty, brilliant piece of social commentary about America in the 20th century, Middlesex is the story of a Greco-American family. It is a series of vignettes about a hermaphrodite and his inbred family. Born as a girl named Callie in 1959, Cal Stephanides discusses with candor and insightfulness the story of his family. Middlesex is filled with deux ex machinae, those little twists and turns of fate which allow everything to "fall into place" as they were meant to.

I have no idea why I didn't pick up this novel earlier. But now I'm glad I did. While the subject seems, at first to be exceedingly strange, there is a lot of truth to what Eugenides puts out on the table for his readers. Cal explores the history of his family, beginning with his grandparents in a small town on a small island in Greece, who immigrate to the United States in 1922. Cal follows his grandparents as they find a new home and a new life in the strange city of Detroit, home to the Ford Motorcar Company in the days before it was known as "Motown." Cal spends his time flickering back and forth between his grandparents' past, his parents' past, and his own. Lingering in the background is that wayward gene- the one which made Cal what he is. Gender is a predominant force in this book, as Eugenides explores sex and sexuality in an intriguing way.

This is an everlasting book, about the values of family and of the home. It was one of those rare books that left an impact upon me. Its a novel about the past, the present and the future- about the things which matter most to us.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Another giveaway

This time, the publicist at WW Norton sent me two copies of The Glass of Time , by Michael Cox--so I'm giving away the second copy. Cox is the author of The Meaning of Night, and this book is the follow-up to that. Leave a comment here to enter to win it! The deadline is next Sunday, 10/5/08.

A giveaway winner, and another giveaway

The winner of the Girl in a Blue Dress contest is... Anna, of Diary of An Eccentric ! My new contest is for a copy of The Shape of Mercy , by Susan Meissner. According to Publisher's Weekly : Meissner's newest novel is potentially life-changing, the kind of inspirational fiction that prompts readers to call up old friends, lost loves or fallen-away family members to tell them that all is forgiven and that life is too short for holding grudges. Achingly romantic, the novel features the legacy of Mercy Hayworth—a young woman convicted during the Salem witch trials—whose words reach out from the past to forever transform the lives of two present-day women. These book lovers—Abigail Boyles, elderly, bitter and frail, and Lauren Lars Durough, wealthy, earnest and young—become unlikely friends, drawn together over the untimely death of Mercy, whose precious diary is all that remains of her too short life. And what a diary! Mercy's words not only beguile but help Abigail and Lars...

Review: The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee

The Piano Teacher is a complicated novel. On the surface, it’s about a love affair between two British ex-patriots in Hong Kong in 1952-3. Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong with her husband Martin at a time when the world is still recovering from WWII; Claire takes up work as a piano teacher for the daughter of a wealthy Chinese family, where she meets Will Truesdale, the Chens’ enigmatic chauffeur. The book jumps back in time between the 1950s and the beginning of WWII, when Will is interned in Stanley, a Hong Kong camp for enemies of Japan. On “the outside” is Tudy Liang, Will’s beautiful Eurasian lover. There’s no doubt that Lee’s writing is beautiful. But there’s something lacking in this short, terse novel that I can’t quite put my finger on. First, I think it’s the tenses she uses when taking about each story: that which is set in the 1950s is in the past tense, while the war scenes are talked about in the present tense (confusing, no?) The interpersonal relationships of the m...