Middlesex

Synopsis: 'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license records my first name simply as Cal.' So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, "Middlesex" is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Review:I loved this book and found it utterly absorbing and engrossing. It was a real pleasure to read, warm and funny for the most part but incredibly sad in places.

It's told from the viewpoint of Calliope/Callie/Cal Stephanides, who was, to all intents and purposes, born, or at least raised, a girl. However, as she nears puberty, alarm bells start ringing, not only in her own head, but in that of her parents also.

She narrates both the past and the present day story. We travel back to 1922, to Bithynios in Asia Minor, where Cal's grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty, are preparing to flee from the great fire of Smyrna (with a pretty shocking secret of their own) and make their way to Detroit, USA.

'I'm the descendant of a smuggling operation. Without their knowing, my grandparents, on their way to America, were each carrying a single mutated gene on the fifth chromosome'

They plan to stay with their only relation, cousin Sourmelina (Lina). In the five years since they've seen her, Lina has 'managed to erase just about everything identifiably Greek about her'. She know's their secret, but she's family, and in any case she has secrets of her own, they move into the house she shares with her husband, Jimmy Zizmo.

Lefty at first get's a job at the Ford plant in Michigan, but things don't work out for him there and he eventually opens a bar up in his own basement and calls it 'The Zebra Room'.

'Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. But in 1922 i t was still a new thing to be a machine'.

He and Desdemona have a son, Milton, and Lina and Jimmy have a daughter, Tessie. Milton and Tessie are attracted to each other, but it's an attraction that Desdemona is vehemently against. Tessie, encouraged by Desdemona, agrees to marry Father Mike, but her love for Milton finally overcomes all opposition and anyway, what's wrong with second cousins marrying?.

In the present day Cal has met Julie, he really likes her, they've been dating for a while, but they haven't slept together. Whenever Cal finds himself in a relationship with a girl he likes, he can go so far but no further, he retreats, scared of what they will say and think. Will he ever be able to trust someone enough to be honest with them?

Tessie and Milton have two children, Chapter Eleven (I liked the fact that we were never told why he was called that) and Calliope. We follow Callie as she grows up, her growing doubts and fears that she's not like the other girls at school, her crush on the 'Obscure Object', right up until the fateful day, when, following an accident, a doctor discovers Callie's hermaphrodite anatomy. The fallout from this discovery is immense, it's heartbreaking to see how Cal and her parent's view this new situation, and what happens as a consequence.

It's a big book, but the pages flew by, at no time was it a trial or tedious. I literally ate up all the words, and, like with all good books, I miss the characters now it's ended.