Items related to Middlesex: 21 Great Bloomsbury Reads for the 21st Century
'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.' So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan. To understand why she is not like other girls, Calliope has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns her 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.
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Review:
Middlesex is a significantly more ambitious and much odder novel than Jeffrey Eugenides' resonant debut, The Virgin Suicides (on DVD), which was a bittersweet paean to adolescent love. This is a sprawling family saga, bursting with life, which spans three generations and crosses several continents. At its core, however, is another unorthodox but exquisite coming-of-age story.
Review:
The book's wily narrator and central character, Calliope Stephanides (named after the muse of epic poetry) is a hermaphrodite raised as a girl who comes to realise she is happier as a boy and is now living as a man in contemporary Berlin. Cal's tale begins, appropriately enough, in Greece (or more precisely Asia Minor)--an Aegean Strasbourg whose sovereignty is claimed by Greece and Turkey. In 1922 brother and sister Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides escaped their war-torn homeland and arrived, as man and wife, in Detroit, America. It is this coupling that ultimately begets their grandchild Calliope and her ambiguous sexuality, as she, or rather by then he, sanguinely notes:
Some people inherit houses; others painting or highly insured violin bows. Still others get Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.As Cal recounts the experiences of the Stephanides clan in their new land--from the Depression to Nixon--he unfurls his own symbiotic odyssey to a new sex. Cal's narrative voice is arch, humorous and self aware, continually drawing attention to its authorial sleights of hand, but never exasperating. This is big, brainy novel--The Oracle of Delphi puts in an unlikely appearance in the middle of a teenage tryst--but one full of compassion. Eugenides' astonishingly rich story persistently engages the heart as well as the mind. --Travis Elborough
'Exuberant, ambitious, deeply compassionate and wildly funny' GQ 'A comic epic The triumph of the novel is its voice' Observer 'This is a truly original and compelling novel, by turns sad, funny and moving' Daily Mail 'A triumph' Sunday Telegraph
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- PublisherBloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 0747590087
- ISBN 13 9780747590088
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages560
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Middlesex: 21 Great Bloomsbury Reads for the 21st Century
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Middlesex: 21 Great Bloomsbury Reads for the 21st Century (21st Birthday Celebratory Edn)
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Middlesex. 21 Great Reads for the 21st Century: 21 Great Bloomsbury Reads for the 21st Century (21st
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