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"Middlesex"
by Jeffery Eugenides
Picador | September 2003 | ISBN 0312422156
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Recommended by Jennifer Trak: "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."
An arresting start to a unique story about how a little girl named Calliope Stephanides became 41-year-old hermaphrodite Cal. Throw your preconceived notions about gender, sexuality and family history out the window. This second novel by the author of the haunting The Virgin Suicides, spins a dark family secret (incest) into a riveting tale that will lure you in with its unapologetic honesty about a difficult topic (intersexuality and genital surgery), and keep you intrigued page after page with the heart-breaking coming of age story of a little girl who is the victim of a "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time."
Putting new meaning into the phrase "it's all in the family", Calliope's journey is traced to 1920s Asia Minor, back to an incestuous union between her grandparents who are brother and sister. Fleeing the Turkish/Greek wars to America, the couple set up as husband and wife and so begin their new family in a remote part of the world, as far away from their past as possible. Such a secret is a heavy weight to bear and is woven into the family tapestry, a silent witness until the birth of Calliope. The powerful narrative seamlessly transitions back and forth between Calliope and Cal, infused with a well-balanced mix of humour, intelligence and insightfulness about a person's true nature, separate from their gender.
Despite its main subject, the novel reads more like a family saga and personal history than a statement about sexuality. Calliope deals with the same issues as most teenagers in America; first love, fitting in at school, and relationships. But when her biological path diverges in puberty and makes her different from 'other girls' it becomes an all-consuming part of her psyche and forces her to make a decision that will alter the course of her life.
The most striking part of the narrative is how moving and believable this touching story about intersexuality becomes without falling into clichés or over dramatization. It's after finishing this novel when the simple lesson we all learned in kindergarten finally begins to ring true that underneath it all, we are all the same.
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Jeffrey Eugenides, photographed by Karen Yamauchi
About the author: Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960, the third son of an American-born father whose Greek parents immigrated from Asia Minor and an American mother of Anglo-Irish descent. Eugenides was educated at public and private schools, graduated from Brown University, and received an MA in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. Two years later, in 1988, he published his first short story. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, the Gettysburg Review and Granta's Best of Young American Novelists". His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993, and has since been translated into fifteen languages and made into a major motion picture. His second novel, Middlesex won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Source: www.bloomsbury.com
