Oh, Middlesex—where do I even start without feeling like I’m unpacking a lifetime of human complexity and contradiction in one sitting? From the very first pages, Eugenides grabs you by the shoulders and drags you into a world that’s intimate, sprawling, and morally tangled. You meet Cal Stephanides before you even fully know him, before you know the full scope of what makes him—him. And already, you’re hooked, because Eugenides doesn’t just tell you a story; he plants you inside it, in the middle of a family, a legacy, a genetic inheritance, and suddenly you’re part observer, part participant.
The novel has a sprawling energy, the Greek immigrants, the rise and fall of Detroit, the sins and successes of a family, all of it woven together like a complex tapestry to which you cannot turn your head. You are with the Stephanides family over the decades, over the continents, over social turmoil, and every page is filled with the tension of historical encounter of the self.
The burden of family and of secrets, of the how and why of older decisions coming back to haunt the present. So we have Cal whose life is a confrontation of biology and circumstance, identity and perception and you can feel the shocks of his journey in your heart. It is not a mere book about intersex identity you are reading but the bewilderment, the terror, the fascination and the frantic pursuit of self-knowledge that it entails.
Eugenides possesses this strange faculty of fusing the grand and the minute. You read of the emigration of the whole family to Greece, of how their children were born, of the strained relations between them, of how parents and children relate, of how violence or affection are exercised in the family, and all this is delivered with the impact of a gut-punch.
One of the scenes, at the beginning of the movie, when the family history turns out to be as dark and secretive as possible, and you feel the ethical burden of generations bearing down on you. It is painful, but in the most desirably way: it makes you confront the fact that human beings bear legacies they did not necessarily make, that identity is inherited and made, that love is both cruel and kind.
And next Eugenides takes you up into Cal as an adolescent and a coming-of-age, and the friction is electric. The coming of age and puberty, the sexuality, sex, and the discovery of otherness collide closely in aspects that are both personal and familiar to everyone. You are experiencing the loneliness of Cal, the fear of being found out, the desire to become accepted and the painful necessity to know to whom he is.
You share with him all his revelations, all his failures, all his successes in self-discovery. And yet, the story does not get soft; it is morally complex, displaying the decisions people make, the impacts which spread in all directions, how identity intersects with history, culture as well as desire.
The Detroit setting is a socially and politically complex live layer. You sense the up and down of the city, the factories, the racial, the economic, all of it in communication with the individual tragedies of the Stephanides family.
One episode when the family house is in the middle of the developing urban environment you know that suddenly Eugenides is not merely narrating an autobiography, but he is in fact imbuing it with the larger context of America, and immigration, and industrial potential and failure. The tension, individual versus social, past versus present, individual identity versus state demand, that permeates all the chapters, is like a faint little drumbeat.
The best thing is that the novel is raw emotionally. The life of Cal is marked by vulnerability, uncertainty and the pangs of the need to be perceived and comprehended wholly. It has heartbreak and sexual awakening and the effects of keeping secrets and the silent moments of tenderness and love shining through the noise.
You experience it all, the shame, the longing, the anger, the exhilaration. Eugenides does not always protect you against inconveniences, but he also accompanies it with sympathy, humor and humanity. When you are at the turning points of the revelation and conflict, you are tensed, out of breath, completely involved into the moral and emotional maze that he has created.
And even the very structure of the narrative adds to that tension. The narrative switches between the past and the present, the history of the family and the personal experience, which gives a feeling of inevitability and tension. You know there are things lying there to discover, and the gradual discovery makes each discovery go like a thunderclap. You are under the burden of fate, the weakness of identity, the strength of self-awareness, and the imminence of human fallibility simultaneously.
Middlesex leaves you unscathed at the end. You have experienced the immigration of a family, change of a city, of a life given its painful twisty-turny coming-of-age. The history, the longing, the moral complexity, the beauty of the prose of Eugenides you close in your chest. It is easy to remember the story as it is not only a story, it is also a life experience of what it is like to be a human being, to be a product of biology, culture, love and history, and to fight to be yourself in the midst of it all.
Middlesex is not merely a book, it is an experience, an unwieldy, personal, ethically complex, adventure that leaves you feeling each throb of identity, desire, kinship, and history. It is unpleasant, thrilling and memorable. It alters you, grows you, tests you and touches you deeply even when you get to the final page.
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