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Middlesex
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Rating: 4 stars
Review: I did not think I would like this book but I really liked it. The main character is a hermaphrodite who decides to live 'between'. It is filled with history, family and assimilation. I loved the picture of the rollercoaster that is in seen in the shape of DNA.
Only 3 Stars for me....A tough one to review for me...good writing and later when I switched to narration, good narrator. But despite that I kept putting it down and then not picking it back up for long stretches of time. The family saga, which was supposedly the backdrop of the transmission of a recessive gene through the generations, was itself very interesting...so much so that it overshadowed the main focus of the storyline, Cal, a great deal of the time for me.
I find myself wishing he’d have stayed with the semi-autobiographical family saga and not tried to mix in the story of an intersex gene...which I’m sure was revolutionary at the time, but now 15 years after it came out seemed sort of exploitative to me, like it was something he added in to get people to look twice and take notice of his family generational saga. I read that the author read a memoir of an actual intersex individual and was dissatisfied with its discussions of intersex emotions and anatomy, but I’m not sure that I feel that merely adding an intersex character and sexing them up a bit was exactly the way to do their story justice, or that it was his place to translate their emotions to the world for them.
** The male author explores those emotions by managing to work in a ‘lesbian’-esque love story (while the character still considers themselves female) & a runaway storyline that of course ends in an exploitative nightclub.🙄Reading it now, those parts feel very trite (lifetime movie of the week) to me, compared to the old country and early immigrant storylines which I enjoyed much better for their originality. Just shows how much time changes perspectives I guess.
This is a story about a man who was born with intersex/ambiguous genitalia, and who was raised as a girl until he hit puberty and testosterone kicked in to make his biological sex more complicated. In addition to this main theme this novel also is about a family that escapes the Turkish conquest and destruction of Smyrna, and their experiences as new immigrants in the US. The family winds up in Detroit, and builds a new life there. They face discrimination as Greeks, and then deal with their position as Greeks in a society that is torn by racial conflict between 'White' and "Black' people, a conflict in which they are suddenly "White'. I liked that this book had so many threads coming together, so that it represented a more realistic perspective on gender identity, that the main character, Cal, is defined by his whole life, including his Greek-immigrant identity, his life as a girl in Detroit, and his complicated physiology. I also liked that this book has a relatively good ending, where all the complications and challenges the characters face are difficult, but not to the point of hopelessness.
I gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads.
I’m a big fan of the Eugenides books I read before this one (Virgin Suicides and The Marriage Plot), and this one was no different. I gave this one 5 stars. I like how Cal’s evolving gender identity and revelations about the family history that lead to his life (such as his Grandmother’s story and the family inbreeding) mirror the themes of the fluid nature of identity (esp as a tie in to the immigrant experience, and the shifting demographics of America), and how the transgressions of the past shape the nature of the future. This was also played with in the ambiguity of “black vs white” and the Black panthers segment (which I loved having watched “who Killed Malcolm X?” recently), and in the family being Greeks from Turkey. I liked how Detroit was used as one of the main settings as well, given how dramatically things shifted there from the height of the auto days, to the “white flight” that happened after that economy crashed. Just in general that this book featured an intersex protagonist was really cool, stories of intersex people are far more common than society lets on, but so underrepresented in media. Given that unnecessary medical procedures to “normalize” intersex people is a huge source of trauma and activism in that community, the fact that this is part of Cal’s story here was great.
Grandma Desdemona’s whole story in the beginning was very intriguing to me too, and her full circle moment with Cal at the end worked so well in my opinion.
Mod
"Like her I unravel my story, and the longer the thread, the less there is left to tell."
5 stars for me.
An easy and enjoyable read dealing with immigration, intense family relationships, inter-racial tensions and the finding of self IdentityThe author carefully and accurately explains the medicine and causation of intersex and explores some relatively well known psychological research into gender identity. Nature or nurture? Biology or environment?
4 stars from me
Somehow I have failed to read this book before now... and I really question why I delayed. It is wonderfully vivid and highly enjoyable. It reads quickly and makes you laugh, cry and think. The story isn't exactly what I thought it would be as it doesn't center solely around Cal, the intersex (hermaphrodite) protagonist. Rather it is a multi-generational family tale. It is set in Eugenides' hometown of Detroit, and because I lived there for four years I really enjoyed the sights and history of the place I already knew. Boyle gave his characters so much life and never seemed to judge them. And he wrote them in such a way that I didn't judge them either. In fact, it never felt like the intersex storyline was the focus despite the fact that the entire tale was the story of how it happened that this young man didn't know he was a young man until well into his teen years. No, it felt like a story of a family ... of love, of dysfunction, of secrets. But mostly of love.