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January 23, 2005
Second Meeting - Middlesex
We gathered today to discuss Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Middlesex is another one of those sprawling American, three-generation saga novels - with a twist! The first half charts the experience of Greek immigrants, a brother and sister who pose incestuously as man and wife. Their son marries his cousin and they give birth to Calliope, the star of the second half of the book. And here's the contemporary twist: Callie has inherited a rare genetic mutation, a gene that has followed her grandparents from the Ottoman empire to Detroit, and she's born an hermaphrodite but brought up as a girl. With a doctor about to operate on her, adolescent Callie knows she's really a boy, runs away to begin a freakish life as a dispossed adolescent.
A 'baggy monster' of a novel at over 500 pages, it has major flaws. It's really two books rolled into one. And the style leaves much to be desired. Some of us liked it, some had severe reservations.
Posted by Richard at January 23, 2005 01:00 PM
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