Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
September 30th, 2008
I’m happy to report that I’ve finally finished reading Middlesex. I was to have finished it back in March with my book group, but only made it about half way through. It’s not that I didn’t like the book. In fact, Middlesex is one of the best books I’ve read in 2008. Life just got in the way. But this week I came back to Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel and loved every minute of it.
The first sentence is a good summary of the storyline:
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Told in the first person narrative, Calli/Cal describes how she was raised as a girl, how she discovered she was actually a boy, and the effects this had on her family. The story feels real; more like a memoir than a work of fiction. Only one sequence felt out of place – when Chapter Eleven brings home his girlfriend, Meg. The two characters were written as hippie stereotypes, which pulled me out of the story. With 529 pages, being disappointed in only one scene is quite a feat.
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October 2nd, 2008 at 07:53 pm
eww.. hippies
October 16th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
OMG. I’m ashamed. I have still NOT finished it. Not only that, I had to return my book to the library without finishing it, as it was over 6 mos. overdue b/c they were about to send collections after me!