Books and
Cooks West
September 2005
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
Sonia's place
Sunday, September 4 at 5:30 PM
From Amazon.com
"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." And so
begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek
American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through
time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how
this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender
heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose
elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains
one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years
of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small
town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the
early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony
suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story
to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is
astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly,
spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence,
insight, and generous amounts of humor:
Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single
words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." … I'd like to
have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar
constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or:
"the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to
have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well
as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never
had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my
story, I need them more than ever.
When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly
realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to
turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your
time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing
it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so
that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas
Parsons
