Middlesex

After the horrors of the wedding and 15 page assignments written in two days, I decided to seek refuge in my (pirated but beloved) ebooks. I didn’t have time to download anything new (and I can’t seem to find anything interesting! WHY? Is it me or has there been a reduction in good books lately?), so I read the Jeffrey Eugenides’ that I already had, The Marriage Plot and Middlesex. Eugenides is an awareness writer. Really. His books have a central theme: Bipolar disorder – Marriage Plot, Hermaphroditism – Middlesex, and the story is built on that. I won’t say plot, because I’m not sure if Middlesex had a plot. I haven’t read Virgin Suicides, but Greg did and he says issues of parental control and emotional abuse come up.

Sorry, this was all that came to mind after the last sentence.

So it feels a little bit like you’re reading a well-written brochure for whatever issue Eugenides has taken under his wing. Just a little, because it is well-written, and you don’t mind gathering all this new information while reading about romance and disappointment and just people being people. He tends to meander though, and as I was reading Alexander McCall Smith’s Blue Shoes and Happiness at the same time, it was like meandering squared. My mum hates McCall Smith because she believes that his books are pointless and the heroines are useless. Eugenides’ characters are McCall Smith for my mum then, because things happen and they react to it, but things tend to go off on (interesting) tangents here and there.

On to Middlesex itself. Middlesex is the name of the house where the main character lives for most of his formative years and is also a literal representative of Cal Stephanides himself. The book is basically a historical/genealogical record/story starting from his grandparents, an incestuous relationship within which the seed of middlesex found fertile ground, and it is sporadically interrupted with a few paragraphs of modern day Cal and a lady that catches his eye. It actually reminded me a little of Indian literature, you know, House of Blue Mangoes, A Suitable Boy etc because of the focus on the family story. Not the horrid Amitav Ghosh sort of writing. One day I will write about how much I hated Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. One day.

While hermaphrodtism is the main focus of the book, there’s also issues of immigrants, racism, war and sexuality. It’s all handled with the same deft, sympathetic hand, and you can imagine being that character and feeling those feelings. I did have a problem understanding the incest at the beginning because it just didn’t make sense to me at all. But it’s done in a way that doesn’t ignore the magnitude of what they are doing, while at the same time presenting it in a matter of fact fashion. ‘Yes, I married my sister, oh god I’m going to have nightmares about it’ sort of thing.

Like this, but in the 1920s. And Greek.

I would get the actual book if I wanted to read Eugenides again though. It didn’t have the proper depth being read on a kindle. It was robbed of some of its old-fashioned weight when translated into digitised format. His works are the kind that need physical form because they’re so dense with life.