num_pages: 532
description: Middlesex is a significantly more ambitious and much odder novel than Jeffrey Eugenides' resonant debut, The Virgin Suicides (on DVD), which was a bittersweet paean to adolescent love. This is a sprawling family saga, bursting with life, which spans three generations and crosses several continents. At its core, however, is another unorthodox but exquisite coming-of-age story.  The book's wily narrator and central character, Calliope Stephanides (named after the muse of epic poetry) is a hermaphrodite raised as a girl who comes to realise she is happier as a boy and is now living as a man in contemporary Berlin. Cal's tale begins, appropriately enough, in Greece (or more precisely Asia Minor)--an Aegean Strasbourg whose sovereignty is claimed by Greece and Turkey. In 1922 brother and sister Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides escaped their war-torn homeland and arrived, as man and wife, in Detroit, America. It is this coupling that ultimately begets their grandchild Calliope and her ambiguous sexuality, as she, or rather by then he, sanguinely notes: Some people inherit houses; others painting or highly insured violin bows. Still others get Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed. As Cal recounts the experiences of the Stephanides clan in their new land--from the Depression to Nixon--he unfurls his own symbiotic odyssey to a new sex. Cal's narrative voice is arch, humorous and self aware, continually drawing attention to its authorial sleights of hand, but never exasperating. This is big, brainy novel--The Oracle of Delphi puts in an unlikely appearance in the middle of a teenage tryst--but one full of compassion. Eugenides' astonishingly rich story persistently engages the heart as well as the mind. --Travis Elborough
language: English
title: By Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex: A Novel (1st)
titlecomplete: By Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex: A Novel (1st) (8.5.2002)
characters: Eleutherios Stephanides, Theodora Stephanides, Michael Antoniou, The Obscure Object, Sourmelina Zizmo, James Zizmo, Desdemona Stephanides, Chapter Eleven, Miltiades Stephanides, Calliope Stephanides
genres: Fiction, Classics, Contemporary, Historical, Queer, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels, LGBT
ratings_count: 631871
places: Michigan, Detroit, Michigan, Bursa, Berlin, Izmir
awards: awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Stonewall Book Award
category: Literature, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: James Tait Black Memorial Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Ambassador Book Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Audie Award
category: Fiction, Unabridged, awardedAt: -62167190400000
name: Lambda Literary Award
category: Transgender, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Premio San Clemente Rosalía-Abanca
category: Lingua estranxeira
publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux