It is not a comfortable subject by any means, and it is definitely not in the background. Middlesex is a pretty difficult book to get into because of the incest that comes in right off the bat. Cal/liope’s family is horrifically inbred. For one thing, there’s just so much incest. I said that it is a weird book, and it is. The novel is narrated by Cal, the younger of two children in the youngest generation, who traces his lineage in part to follow a chromosomal mutation that has caused his intersexuality. It is a historical drama: various members of the family flee to America from Greece, work on early assembly lines, fight in WWII, run a speakeasy, witness race riots in Detroit, turn hippy in the ‘60s, and more. It follows three generations of the Stephanides family across many decades. I suppose that first and foremost it is a family drama. That being said, Middlesex is a really strange book.īear with me on this, because there’s no real way to accurately explain what exactly Middlesex is about. Thankfully, I’m more inclined to agree with the people that handed out that prize than with my previous opinion of Eugenides. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into: I read Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot about five years ago and didn’t care for it, but Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize winner, so it really could have gone either way. I have a list of 100 classic books that everyone should read that I’m working through, and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is on it. I definitely saved the weirdest for last.
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