Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (From Swindon Advertiser)

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

9:58pm Monday 27th October 2008

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Middlesex is so many things all at once, much like its hermaphrodite narrator, Calliope.

It's a coming of age tale, a romance, a family saga, a historical novel set in olden days Greece, a social commentary on life for immigrants in America.

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It tells the tale of Calliope, who is born first as a girl and later as a boy, as the first line of the novel tells us.

But to tell the tale of this one person, Eugenides stretches back through time to the narrator's grandparents and their early life in Greece, through their struggle to get to America and survive in an alien land.

It chronicles not only the many larger than life characters in the family, but conjures up a vivid image of Detroit through the speak-easys of the 1930s depression, the warzone of the race riots years later and into more modern times.

It is hard to explain why this novel is so good, simply because there is so much in it, it's impossible to know where to begin. It's funny, it's sad, it's poetic, it's tragic, it's surreal, it's so detailed in its reality it reads at time like a documentary of American life...

Suffice to say, when I finished reading it, I knew one thing for sure: Calliope is set to go down as one of the greatest narrators in the history of literature.

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