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elfbiterJeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
Cal(liope) Stephanides is a intersexual (to be exact, a pseudohermaprodite male with mixed genitalia) whose Greek-born parents raised as a girl. And that's about it.
Unfortunately, the fact that the narrator (I hesitate to call him a protagonist) of this story is an intersexual is primarily a gimmick, a detail that has relevance only to the last chapters of the book. Granted, Eugenides does his best to add literary "freak factor" (of dubious genetic reliability) to his parentage to make his fate seem preordained; His grandparents are Greek refugee siblings that marry and their closet lesbian cousin married to a bootlegger. His parents are their children. And when the narrator eventually decides to strike on his own, the only fate Eugenides can think of is the pornographic version of the freak show.
The book is more of an immigration tale. The sister and brother move to USA after the disastrous war of Greeks against Turkey in 1922, manage to escape the massacre of Smyrna to a ship and stage a fake romance aboard. They end up in Detroit and mix with the roaring twenties, the bootlegging during the prohibition, the Ford T-Model factory and fake form of beginnings of the Nation of Islam. As a child, Cal witnesses Detroit race riots and reconstruction and his father's apparent attempt to compete with MacDonalds. Only when the doctor, who notices that she is actually genetically he, wants to operate so that he would end up being she for the rest of his life, he decides to do something - and not very successfully.
I assume Eugenides is trying to pull some satirical mytopoetry from an old hat of incestuous classical tragedy but I don't think he's doing it particularly well. This yarn does not give any insight to intersex condition – narrator is just a mouthpiece with different gonads and the only thing Eugenides can think of doing with them is a freak show. The very name of the novel is misleading since majority of the story does not refer to intersex condition at all – it is just a gimmick.
Cal(liope) Stephanides is a intersexual (to be exact, a pseudohermaprodite male with mixed genitalia) whose Greek-born parents raised as a girl. And that's about it.
Unfortunately, the fact that the narrator (I hesitate to call him a protagonist) of this story is an intersexual is primarily a gimmick, a detail that has relevance only to the last chapters of the book. Granted, Eugenides does his best to add literary "freak factor" (of dubious genetic reliability) to his parentage to make his fate seem preordained; His grandparents are Greek refugee siblings that marry and their closet lesbian cousin married to a bootlegger. His parents are their children. And when the narrator eventually decides to strike on his own, the only fate Eugenides can think of is the pornographic version of the freak show.
The book is more of an immigration tale. The sister and brother move to USA after the disastrous war of Greeks against Turkey in 1922, manage to escape the massacre of Smyrna to a ship and stage a fake romance aboard. They end up in Detroit and mix with the roaring twenties, the bootlegging during the prohibition, the Ford T-Model factory and fake form of beginnings of the Nation of Islam. As a child, Cal witnesses Detroit race riots and reconstruction and his father's apparent attempt to compete with MacDonalds. Only when the doctor, who notices that she is actually genetically he, wants to operate so that he would end up being she for the rest of his life, he decides to do something - and not very successfully.
I assume Eugenides is trying to pull some satirical mytopoetry from an old hat of incestuous classical tragedy but I don't think he's doing it particularly well. This yarn does not give any insight to intersex condition – narrator is just a mouthpiece with different gonads and the only thing Eugenides can think of doing with them is a freak show. The very name of the novel is misleading since majority of the story does not refer to intersex condition at all – it is just a gimmick.
