Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.
"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 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 l967, 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. Lyrical and thrilling, Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
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Community Reviews
The book describes the pain and pleasure we feel as humans living on Earth, with the added struggles of being Greek in the midcentury Midwest and growing through puberty as an undiagnosed intersex individual.
Some of the strongest literary tools woven throughout were allusions to classic Greek literature and theater. I also loved the symbolism of the crocus and flower buds to describe something that might otherwise been seen as grotesque.
I truly loved this book and the stories it told. One of my favorite passages:
âFrom my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didnât do much of anything and then they did everything all at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me. Some people inherit houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. Still others get a Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.â
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