Middlesex, for those who’ve been living in a cave (or just watching tv and playing video games), won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year. Penned by Jeffery Eugenides, author of the widely acclaimed Virgin Suicides, the book covers the 80-90 years worth of family history, the family of the protagonist, Caliope Stephanides, or Cal, or Callie. And the history here is not just for history’s sake, but also due to the fact that Cal is a hermaphrodite, and this genetic disorder is traced back through his ancestors as unwitting carriers, some of whom bear a certain “guilt” for contributing to it’s likelihood, despite their not understanding such consequences.
Eugenides writing style makes for addictive reading. Cal ostensibly is narrating, but she narrates details of her grandparents past that infers omniscience. In this sense it’s almost Oracular. Of course, the Stephanides family is Greek in origin like Eugenides, and so one can draw parallels to Greek tragedy or even to epic prose of Homer. I have heard others compare his style at least in Middlesex to that of Nabokov, but I cannot vouch for this, not having read any myself yet.
They story begins with his paternal grandparents who live on the mountainside town in what is now Turkey. His grandmother, Desdemona, inherits the silkworm trade of her parents at an early age and cares for her younger brother Lefty. They eventually must flee as the Ottoman army retakes the territory from the Greeks, and end up in roaring 1920’s Detroit. The rest of the book is much of a history of post World War I America as a family saga. We get a close-up picture of Fords factories, the beginnings of the black empowerment movement, World War II, Detroit race riots of 1967, and more.
Interspersed in his family and eventually personal history, Cal’s present-day persona, at 41, is still trying to come to terms with his sexuality, which still rules him and his relationships, or lack thereof. He his living in Germany and meets a woman whom he is interested in. So while we learn about Cal’s coming of age and family history, at the same time we get a present-tense story of how his current self is developing (or not) a relationship. This allows one to piece together the motives, methods, and eccentricities of present day cal as we learn about what made him what he is. This is a very effective device.
I actually listened to this book, an unabridged version from Audible.com. The narrator, Kristoffer Tabori, was as excellent as the book itself. He manages to believably encapsulate so many different characters from the 20’s to the present day, with a myriad of accents and dialects impeccably.
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