Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides

Sing, muse, of it taking me so long to finish reading this book! Because of my ever tightening schedule, this book took me as long to finish reading as Anna Karenina (and I started it over almost as many time) And all I can say is that it was totally worth it.

Middlesex is the story of a Greek girl who finds out a fourteen that she isn't a girl at all, but a boy. The confusion has to do with the fact that she is a hermaphrodite. In tracing the defecting gene that manifested itself in his body, the narrator tells the story of three generations of the Stephanides family (a family tree with fewer branches than it should have), through war torn Greece during the war with the Turks, into depression era Detroit, WWII, Korea, the sixties and all that decade had to offer, up to the current president who is popular because his name has only one syllable.

The appeal in the book to me was the constant terror I was in. I don't mean a Stephen Kind kind of terror that gives you nightmares about goulish monters. This is an emotional terror. The kind when one sits on the edge of one's seat knowing that he is about to be hurt, hurt because the characters are hurt. Eugenides makes you love this family, and because he is Greek, you know that some of them will die unnaturally and some will go through tremendous emotional distress. And Euginedes certainly delivers, but in a way that the reader is okay with it in the end.

The reader comes out of the book feeling as though he has gone through a journey through the life of this family. He feels he is better for it.

One of the things I have noticed about great books is that I always feel a tinge of melencholy when I close the cover for the last time. I have spent the past few months with these characters and they have become my friends (a statement of my introvertedness I know). I close the book knowing that I will likely never visit these friends again and knowing that I shall miss them. I know that I will think about them from time to time and consider picking the book up again to visit my old friends.

But, alas, a Don DeLillo novel awaits, sitting on my coffee table waiting for me to finish this blog. Stay tuned for that review.