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[warning: post contains spoilers, if you don't like that sort of thing...]
Recently finished this. Echoing some other comments, i think the pacing of the book was odd - I would have loved there to be more of Cal's life post-"coming out", and explaining the reasons ze ended up where ze did...
As it was, the last few chapters seemed kind of rushed, when it was what seemed to be the pivotal bits - maybe it was me coming to the book from its "billing" as an intersex life story, but it almost seemed more like a novel about a family and their experience of cultural integration into America, with an intersex-themed bit tacked on at the end...
I swung between really liking and occasionally being slightly annoyed by Eugenides' writing - the narratorial interjections felt a bit gimmicky at first, a bit quirky-for-its-own-sake, and certain other things were a bit self-consciously postmodern (we never find out why Cal's brother is called "Chapter Eleven"). people who know about definitions of literary styles - is Eugenides considered modernist, postmodernist or something else? His style is sort of reminiscent of some of the "magic realist" school, but apart from a few stylistic devices there wasn't really much "magic" or "the impossible", so much as the "real, but not often realised to be possible"...
[SPOILERS]
One thing that struck me as odd was that there seemed to be no real indication (to me, at least) that Cal/Calliope's own gender identity was as anything other than a girl-attracted-to-girls before she read her diagnosis file - so that, to me, hir re-identification as a boy seemed to be based on nothing more than finding out ze had a Y chromosome... admittedly, all the intersex people I have known were raised as boys but are now female-identified, but all of them, when living as the "wrong" gender, were deeply unhappy (to the point of near-constant suicidal feelings) until able to live as their preferred gender, so i felt i had to suspend disbelief on that bit... would be interested in the perspectives of any trans men or male-identified intersex people here on that...
Also, i'd be interested to know whether some of the people and places mentioned in the book are real, based on real people, or totally fictional (I knew Wallace Fard and the Nation of Islam were/are real, although Fard probably wasn't actually what Middlesex claims him to be)... Dr Luce and Zora Khyber, for instance (again, i want more detail on the later bits!)...
I definitely enjoyed it tho (especially after having not read a "big" themed novel for a long while), and I intend to lend it to my (female-IDed) intersex friend to see what she thinks of it (tho most of what she reads is sword-and-sorcery fantasy, but Middlesex touches on lots of themes she's interested in, and i think the style will appeal to her)... |
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