As you can by the labels, in general I tend to stay away from Literature in favour of plot and accessibility. However, as I am not immune to pressure, I am aware of the pantheon of books that I feel as though I ought (with a moral imperative) to read. Middlesex was borrowed from my mother several months ago and has been reproachfully looking at me ever since, until I finally picked it up en route to somewhere where I didn’t want to be seen with the latest instalment of Sweet Valley High (or its more adult equivalent).
I’m glad I took so long to get to this award-winning novel. Middlesex tells the story of three generations of Stephanides’s, to narrator Cal who, born a girl, came to manhood in the 1970’s. The action seamlessly segues from Greece in the first decades of the 1900’s, through Detroit in the mid-90’s, to Berlin at the turn of the twenty-first century.
The novel, which somehow manages to convincingly blend first-person narrative with a first-person omniscience, weaves its way non-chronologically through the childhoods and emigration to America of Cal’s grandparents, the equally turbulent adolescence and marriage of his parents, and his own girlhood with older brother Chapter Eleven.
Though imposing, at over 500 pages, reading Middlesex was delightful. The plot is beautifully paced, without sacrificing character development; the prose is perfectly balanced between description, dialogue and narration, between telling and showing (a distinction of which I have very recently become more than usually aware); the narrator’s tone is by turns ironic, detached, sympathetic, and irreverent. Any further commentary from me will simply serve to detract from this perfectly wrought work. – Alex
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