3/101 #29 - First of 5 Books from Oprah’s Book Club – Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

This novel was nothing like what I expected from the title. I’m rather glad that I picked this book because of a very brief synopsis and the fact that it was on Oprah’s list and available at Half Priced Books, but didn’t read any editorial reviews – it exceeded by expectations by far.

I thought I was going to sit down and read a fictional account of a hermaphrodite and the trials and romance challenges the person encountered in his/her life. Intrigued by GLBT issues, that storyline would have been entertaining enough for me. However, this book was nothing like I expected and was everything more.

The story is told from the first-person narrative of Calliope (Cal) Stephanides, a 2nd generation Greek-American. And true to the Greek culture, Cal’s development and sense of self do not start at her birth, but are intertwined with generations of history of her family.

Oh, I apologize in advance but during this review you are going to witness me using him/her, she/he interchangeably because for the majority of the story, Cal is Calliope, and that is how I grew to identify with her. But by the end I understand how Calliope is really Cal all along, and it gave me a real sense of what a hermaphrodite or anyone who suffers from gender identify disorder must go through.

I also really like plays on words. Middlesex is the street that Calliope lived on when she hit puberty. It is a real street in Flint, Michigan. It’s so important because it is where Calliope discovered how she was different, who she was meant to love, and that life for her would always be a bit confusing. But I of course loved that Eugenides chose this unique location because Calliope/Cal and likely all hermaphrodites and sufferers of gender identity disorder spend most of their lives being somewhere in between male and female - somewhere in the middle - Middlesex.

This book drew me in and, at the expense of my home’s tidiness (I put off chores for the sake of keeping my nose pressed in the book), consumed my thoughts. Cal explains that how he came to be began all the way back when his grandparents were Greeks living in Turkey during the time the Greeks were driven out. I don’t want to completely ruin the story, so I will only say that we go on to see how people fall in love in spite of strange forbidden circumstances, and how there are so many opportunities for chance to change the entire course of history and the likelihood that Calliope would be born the way she was, which is because of a genetic mutation that requires a certain combination of genes to be realized.

A reader of mostly non-fiction, I had to remind myself repeatedly that this wasn’t a true story. That Cal wasn’t real and the story of Desdemonia and Lefty, of Tessie and Milton, and all the other characters were not true accounts.

Eugenides writes so descriptively and so well that I was drawn in as if I were witnessing the Detroit riots myself, which, as a student of diversity in America, was a whole other fascinating subplot in the story for me.

By taking the reader through the lives of 3 generations of Stephanides, Eugenides makes you care for Calliope. He makes you feel the confusion Calliope feels about her anatomy, and how isolated and alone she felt about asking someone about it – but knowing it was somehow different. He helps you feel the anguish of a teenager in love with someone society would say was unacceptable and given it all takes place during the civil rights movement drew so many parallels in my mind as I read it. Eugenides makes you feel her pain and isolation even as an adult, accepting of who she is (or actually he, by the time adulthood has come about) but never being sure if the person who holds his heart will return the affection once she finds out how he is “different.”

For anyone who might have felt they didn’t fit in, this book will certainly be a meaningful and eventually comforting read.