"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides.
"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides.
First read: 06-02-2008 (audiobook)
Second read: 28.07.2012 (in paper. To think I meant to re-read this once a year!)
Notes: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Middlesex is an epic with all the right references and literary credentials. But it's not at all pretentious, there is undeniable passion behind the academic interest in mythology, genetics and the human condition. The kind thruly dedicated novel readers can sympathize with, because it is not the point of novels to explain our very selves?
Middlesex is not, as one might suppose, the story of an individual but the story of a family. In a somewhat strange narrative style the point of view the main character, Cal, gets inside the minds of his family members for moments and sometimes simply narrates from outside, even young Calliope's (his own) experiences, creating an interesting mix of intimacy and satirical irony, humor and tragedy. I loved it, I loved the characters because even though they are nothing special they are all very human, I loved the narrator and even the strange subplots. What annoyed me a bit was the way it constantly switches from past to present without any apparent reason, but that might be the audiobook rather than the novel. (Yup, it was the audiobook, didn't notice a thing on re-reading on paper) It reminded me of Allende's "The House of Spirits" (La casa de los espiritus), although the second and third parts are more modern than magical realism.
Last time i didn't care much for Cal's present life, this time I wish we could have gotten a little more. Well, mostly I wanted MORE. I guess with a past like that, his present pales in comparison. The thing that doesn't quite click is that what Cal is saying, really, is that he is not quite a man or quite a woman but that such things exist and that biology is very relevant (often he implies the attraction Calliope felt to girls was biologically linked to the male cromosomes, for eg). I liked Zora's ideas much better, her insistence in her difference, instead of Cal's desperation to fit in.
"My swagger wasn't that different from what lots of adolescent boys put on, trying to be manly. For that reason it was convincing. Its very falseness made it credible."
"I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public."
"Normality wasn’t normal, it couldn’t be. If normality were normal everybody could leave it alone, they could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people and especially doctors had doubts about normality, they weren’t sure normality was up to the job, so they felt inclined to give it a bust."
First read: 06-02-2008 (audiobook)
Second read: 28.07.2012 (in paper. To think I meant to re-read this once a year!)
Notes: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Middlesex is an epic with all the right references and literary credentials. But it's not at all pretentious, there is undeniable passion behind the academic interest in mythology, genetics and the human condition. The kind thruly dedicated novel readers can sympathize with, because it is not the point of novels to explain our very selves?
Middlesex is not, as one might suppose, the story of an individual but the story of a family. In a somewhat strange narrative style the point of view the main character, Cal, gets inside the minds of his family members for moments and sometimes simply narrates from outside, even young Calliope's (his own) experiences, creating an interesting mix of intimacy and satirical irony, humor and tragedy. I loved it, I loved the characters because even though they are nothing special they are all very human, I loved the narrator and even the strange subplots. What annoyed me a bit was the way it constantly switches from past to present without any apparent reason, but that might be the audiobook rather than the novel. (Yup, it was the audiobook, didn't notice a thing on re-reading on paper) It reminded me of Allende's "The House of Spirits" (La casa de los espiritus), although the second and third parts are more modern than magical realism.
Last time i didn't care much for Cal's present life, this time I wish we could have gotten a little more. Well, mostly I wanted MORE. I guess with a past like that, his present pales in comparison. The thing that doesn't quite click is that what Cal is saying, really, is that he is not quite a man or quite a woman but that such things exist and that biology is very relevant (often he implies the attraction Calliope felt to girls was biologically linked to the male cromosomes, for eg). I liked Zora's ideas much better, her insistence in her difference, instead of Cal's desperation to fit in.
"My swagger wasn't that different from what lots of adolescent boys put on, trying to be manly. For that reason it was convincing. Its very falseness made it credible."
"I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public."
"Normality wasn’t normal, it couldn’t be. If normality were normal everybody could leave it alone, they could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people and especially doctors had doubts about normality, they weren’t sure normality was up to the job, so they felt inclined to give it a bust."