Middlesex

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness', 'joy,' or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for ''the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

I recently read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and found it to be absolutely incredible! To say it is a novel about a hermaphrodite is a gross understatement and doesn't even come close to doing this book justice. Because, yes, it is a novel about a hermaphrodite and the discovery process and life of Cal (Callie) Stephanides, but it is also so much more..

"Lefty never discouraged any speculation. He seized the opportunity of transatlantic travel to reinvent himself. He wrapped a ratty blanket over his shoulders like an opera cape. Aware that whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever seemed to be would become what he was - already an American, in other words - he waited for Desdemona to come up on the deck"

It catalouges the struggles of a Greek family, fleeing Greece coming to America, the epic of their life.

"Lefty, who'd been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at where the transmission stopped. In other words, the future. He stepped off to meet it. Desdemona, having no alternative, followed."

Eugenides does such a great job showing the complex emotions of all characters involved in the book. The reader leaves this book and has an extensive history on the Stephanides family and their journey.

"To my grandparents Detroit was like one big Koza Han during cocoon seasion. What they didn't see were the workers sleeping on the streets because of the housing shortage, and the ghetto just to the east, a thirty-square block  area bounded by Leland, Macomb, Hastings, and Brush streets, teeming with the city's African Americans, who weren't allowed to live anywhere else. They didn't see, in short, the seeds of the city's destuction - its second destruction - because they were part of it, too, all these people coming from everywhere to cash in on Henry Ford's five-dollar-a-day promise."

The mass amount of history that is catalouged in this novel is incredible. Invasions in Greece, the rise and fall of Detroit. I honestly felt so much more wordly after reading this novel.

"Until we came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets' upturned noses suggested that there was another America to which we could never gain admittance. All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that has happened since."

Eugenides also does an excellent job portrayig racism, seperation, and the strong thoughts that littered people's mind at the time.

"Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel, has already changed past understanding. Right here is where the trail goes cold. I can take you this far and no further. Maybe it was jealous rage. Or maybe he was just figuring out his options. Weighing a dowry against the expense of raising a family. Guessing that it couldn't go on forever, this boom time of Prohibition."

And did I mention that he does a great job explaining complex emotions?

"There are lots of nights out in Berlin when, emboldened by a good-value Rioja, I forget my physical predicament and allow myself to hope. They tailored suit comes off. The Thomas Pink shirt, too. My date can't fail to be impressed by my physical condition (Under the armor of my double-breasted  suits is another of gym-built muscle.) But the final protection, my roomy, my discreet boxer shorts, these I do not remove. Ever. Instead I leave, making excuses. I leave and never call them again. Just like a guy"
All of this is not to say that this novel doesn't also do an excellent job chronicling the life of a hermaphrodite and the emotions, metamorphasis, and feelings of Cal Stephanides. Because he does an absolutely incredible job. It is no wonder this novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003. I think I clipped a record amount of passages from this novel because it was so well written. Almost every sentence seemed noteworthy.

"Milton's face darkened. He swallowed hard. Callie waited for him to say the word, to quote Webster's, but he didn't. He only looked at her across the table, his head low, his eyes dark, warm, sad, and full of love. There was so much love in Milton's eyes that it was impossible to look for truth."