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Middlesex: A Novel | 
| Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $0.18
You Save: $14.82 (99%)
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Rating:  848 reviews
Sales Rank: 12612
Media: Paperback
Pages: 544
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0312422156
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780312422158
ASIN: 0312422156
Publication Date: September 16, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: ** Possible marking on cover. 100% Satisfaction guaranteed on all purchases. Delivery is 7-14 days for standard mail. **
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Amazon.com Review
"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
Product Description
"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. . . 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 843 more reviews...
 Must Read September 25, 2008
Joanna Freeman (NYC)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was an amazing book. Eugenides tells a sprawling tale of the Stephanides family told from the perspective of a hermaphrodite (Cal) to explain the sequence of events that led him to become the person that he is. It is riveting from the second Eugenides begins in Turkey with Cal's grandparents childhood to the conclusion of the narrative in Berlin. At the same time funny, touching, and heart-breaking this book provides a level of humanity not seen in much literature today.
 Middlesex, A Novel September 18, 2008
Richard K. Orr (Orem, Utah)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I can't review something I have not yet received. It has been over 30 days and the book has not yet arrived.
Boring! September 11, 2008
T. Trent (Coatesville, PA United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you like incestual relationships, this may be the book for you. Half the book is family history and deals with the grandparents incestual relationship and then the parents semi-incestual relationship. It isn't described as a particularly bad thing that a brother and sister get married and you will even have to endure "sex scenes" between the two. It then insults people who actually are intersex by giving the impression that the incest is what caused the baby to be born that way.
The book doesn't get around to the story of Cal who is supposedly the main character. I was really looking forward to reading about Cal and his life which would have been fascinating. Instead I got a ton of boring family history that has nothing to do with the life of the main character, complete with a ton of useless crap, like the grandmothers ovulation and the fathers wierd relationship with his cousin in which he gives her thrills by touching her with his clarinet. It is actually a little disturbing.
I don't know why pulitzer or Oprah thought this book was so good. I am quite confused.
Marvelous novel September 7, 2008
Alexandros Orphanides (New York)
Read this book a few years ago - and for some reason Amazon deleted my review.
While not a fan of his first novel, I find that Eugenides wrote a captivating tale - one tries to avoid terms like "coming of age" but when the story is told so creatively, woven into history, with such unique circumstance - and such emotional honesty, the novel exceeds generalizations.
Fascinating Story September 5, 2008
Jane Kaufmann (Oreland, PA United States)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book from start to finish. It is a "meaty" story, filled with the history of the characters. There is also enough fact as to be educational and thought-provoking.
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