Paperback
English language
Published Nov. 7, 2003 by Bloomsbury.
"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 1974. . . 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 …
"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 1974. . . 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, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. --back cover
This is a great book. Good writing, engaging story, full characters. For some reason I couldn't get into it though, like it wasn't what I was looking for. But don't listen to me; it really is a wonderful book, and Eugenides is a wonderful writer.
I just finished Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, the 13th book in my 2022 #FReadom reading list of books removed or threatened in Texas libraries and schools. I found Cal Stephanides to be a truly scintillating narrative voice for a fascinating story.
Eugenides offers rich, multithreaded explorations of Detroit, Greek-American family life, and other areas near his own experience. And he may lead some readers to reflect on the meaning of sex & gender, despite rooting the story overall in rather binary notions of gender.
But I believe the novel's insights on gender identity and intersex reality would have been deeper & more insightful had Eugenides actually spoken with intersex people when writing the novel. Sadly, he didn't - a disappointing missed opportunity. www.intersexinitiative.org/popculture/middlesex-faq.html
