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  • "In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. 'It's lke the paintings in the museum,' she said. 'Just an excuse to show people with no clothes.'"

    "All of a sudden American wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was bout ... Continue

    "In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. 'It's lke the paintings in the museum,' she said. 'Just an excuse to show people with no clothes.'"

    "All of a sudden American wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was bout something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!"

    "Shakes your hand while he pisses in your pocket"

    "The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the Bombyx mori, no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: 'The legs of the larvae have dgenerated, and the adults do not fly'"

    

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• ― Amusaur83 said on Aug 12, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • About my hometown: Detroit/Grosse Pointe. The descriptions of familiar places felt exactly right.

    

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• ― dunrie said on Oct 14, 2006 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • Better than "The Virgin Suicides," although Eugenides's prose can occasionally be tiresome.

    

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• ― Coilette said on Jun 14, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • My thoughts

  • This beautifully written book is more than a story of a hermaphrodite. It is a rich family history interwoven with the history of Greek immigrants, as well as a history of life in the Detroit area from the early auto industry through the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. I liked all the characters ... Continue

    This beautifully written book is more than a story of a hermaphrodite. It is a rich family history interwoven with the history of Greek immigrants, as well as a history of life in the Detroit area from the early auto industry through the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. I liked all the characters from the grandparents Desdemona and Lefty through the narrator, Cal/Callie.

    

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• ― krin5292 said on Apr 20, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • Middlesex

  • This book needs more than 4 stars.

    

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• ― Readingrat said on Jan 14, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

Spanning eight decades and chronicling the wild ride of a Greek-American family through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, Jeffrey Eugenides’ witty, exuberant novel on one level tells a traditional story about three generations of a fantastic, absurd, lovable immigrant family -- blessed and cursed with generous doses of tragedy and high comedy.

But there’s a provocative twist. Cal, the narrator -- also Callie -- is a hermaphrodite. And the explanation for this takes us spooling back in time, through a breathtaking review of the twentieth century, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set our narrator’s life in motion.

Middlesex is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It’s a brilliant exploration of divided people, divided families, divided cities and nations -- the connected halves that make up ourselves and our world. Justly acclaimed when it was released in Fall 2002, it announces the arrival of a major writer for our times.

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