“You get older, you
puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there’s it’s only a
quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re
time-travelling. In this life we grow backwards.”
A big, bold,
hilarious saga that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Middlesex follows three generations of
the Stephanides family from 1920s Greece to Detroit in the swinging 60s to
contemporary Berlin. The narrator of this epic tale is Calliope, whose
grandparents’ unusual union meant that she was born a girl but, thanks to a
rare genetic mutation, grows into a man – Cal, now 41, is recording his/her
life story for science and posterity. Superbly detailed descriptions of people
and places make them feel incredibly real and specific, but the themes explored
by this imaginative book (race, war, religion, sexuality, gender, the immigrant
experience) are universal.
Read an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides by Jonathan Safran Foer here.
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