Winter Reads...

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - 3 stars ***

This book was one purchased from a charity shop, as The Virgin Suicides by the same author is one of my favourite books. This one is considerably longer, and tells the story of Calliope, a hermaphrodite who is born and lives as a girl until she is fourteen, when the discovery of her sex causes her to run away from home.

I must admit this book took me quite a long time to get into, but about halfway through I found it impossible to put it down. The action becomes more gripping as Calliope slowly succumbs to her feelings and accepts who she is. She develops a close relationship with a girl at school who she refers to as 'The Object' and slowly it becomes apparent that the feelings she has for her are more than platonic. The descriptions that Eugenides uses convey her close observation of the girl she is so in love with:

'As we revolved on our towels that summer, self-basting, the Object's freckles darkened, going from butterscotch to brown. The skin between them darkened, too, knitting her freckles together into a speckled harlequin mask.'

Calliope's world is torn apart however, when her parents learn about her condition and arrange for sex reassignment surgery to make her a girl. Feeling that she is actually supposed to live as a male, she cuts off her hair and renames herself Cal, leaving the Object behind to run away from home:

'It was unquestionably a male face, but the feelings inside that boy were still a girl's. To cut off your hair after a breakup was a feminine reaction. It was a way to start over, to renounce vanity, to spite love. I knew that I would never see the Object again. Despite bigger problems, greater worries, it was heartbreak that seized me when I first saw my male face in the mirror. I thought: it's over. By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much. I was trying to be stronger.'

The beginning of the book explains the back story to Cal's tale, going into a lot of detail about her grandparents marriage and consequent emigration to America (who were brother and sister, which caused the chromosome abnormality leading to her condition) and her family history, which personally I didn't find as entertaining as the remainder of the book. I preferred the sections detailing more recent events, such as her schooling, when she runs away and the story of her relationship with the Object etc. It was nice to create an in depth character for her grandmother though, who lives with the family, and who, at the end, is one of the only people who accepts Cal without question, and finally explains the secret that makes everything fall into place. I particularly enjoyed this description towards the last few pages of the book, as it seemed a poignant and significant conclusion for the book to express upon coming to the close:

'The lesson of Desdemona's suffering and rejection of life insisted that old age would not continue the manifold pleasures of youth but would instead be a long trial that slowly robbed life of even its smallest, simplest joys. Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.'

Despite the hazy start, I really liked this book, and am very surprised at the vast difference it has in comparison with The Virgin Suicides. Now that Jeffrey Eugenides has written a third book, I shall be searching it out in order to further my opinion of his work.