![]() ![]() This is my first book by Jeffrey Eugenides. That’s just what Middlesex feels to me right now. ![]() You know that no matter what you write you will not do justice to the great book you have just finished reading. ![]() You find the right words to describe it and you don’t know where to start. You and I know when we read a gem of a book. Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she 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. ![]() So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan. “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.” Surprising in many levels let’s start with the blurb: Is it the name of a location? Or a tongue-in-cheek for the main hermaphrodite character? As I soon found out that the title meant both and also a very complex and it is clever book too. The book sat on my shelf for 2.5 years unread with that provocative book title staring at me. ![]()
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