This must be one of the most intriguing first sentences of a novel I have ever
read. I am sure it will not be long before it is one of the few classic first
sentences around.
Jeffrey Eugenides wrote ‘Middlesex’, a book that has this interesting baby-girl-
come-teenage-boy as a narrator. The narrator Cal (Calliope as a girl) is a
hermaphrodite, brought about by a genetic deficiency that can occur in (often
isolated) communities where in-breeding is difficult to escape.
One such isolated village lies on a hillside overlooking mount Olympus in Asia
Minor. Lefty Stephanides is a third-cousin removed from Desdemona
Stephanides, but she is also his sister. This community of Greeks starts to feel
a little unwelcome when more and more parts of Asia Minor are occupied by the
Turks. Brother and sister Stephanides decide to flee. They are about to leave
the country through the port of Smyrna when the Turks loot and burn the city.
They finally escape and book a passage on a ship to America; they have a
distant relative there. This is the only thing that ties them to the past; already
on the ship they reinvent their identities and decide that the fact that they love
each other both as lovers and as siblings does not matter; America is the land
of opportunity after all.
Since only their distant relative is aware of the fact they are brother and sister,
they do indeed get away with it, and they even get married in the Greek
Orthodox church of Detroit, where they settle. Lefty finds a job pretty quickly
(guess where in nineteen thirties Detroit) and Desdemona finds herself
pregnant after a rather interesting night at the theatre. She fears for her baby,
but all turns out to be normal. On the surface at least.
Cal is the narrator of the story of the mutated gene that made him/her into what
he is, the gene that was transmitted from his grandparents to his parents to
himself. Cal wants to write his own history and seems as interested in creating it
in terms of a full fledged Greek tragedy as much as telling a faithful version of
his family’s history.
Cal is not a reliable narrator, just as he is not a reliable man or woman. He
floats somewhere in between. He speaks of the thoughts and feelings of his
grandparents and parents as if he where there, which of course he was not.
The story continues with the story of his own parents, already being close
family though unbeknownst to them. They fall in love, too. They recognise
something of each other in one another and they too have a child: a beautiful
baby girl, Calliope. She seems to live her normal little girl’s and teenage girl’s
life until she starts to have feelings for ‘the Object’.
Our first infatuation is a big event for every one of us, but Calliope’s feelings for
‘the Object’ initiates her realisation that maybe she is a bit different than many
other girls in some respects. Eugenides demonstrates in ‘Middlesex’
(occasionally the name of the villa in which the Stephanides family lives) that
though Calliope’s situation might be extreme, this novel is really a family history
and a history of someone’s adolescence. We all change in adolescence. We
grow up, we transform from children into adults. We all carry inside ourselves
the seeds of who we will become as adults to some extent, just as our parents
and grand parents and so on already carry in them a part of what will form us.
Just as in his first novel (‘The Virgin Suicides’), Jeffrey Eugenides takes a
subject that seems perhaps extreme or ‘freaky’ and presents it to us as
something normal and on a more symbolical level as representing something
that every human being can relate to. Adolescence is something we all can
relate to and Eugenides’ Stephanides family makes an interesting case for the
‘nature vs. nurture’ debate.
One last thing I must note about ‘Middlesex’ is the fact that, apart from the fact
that it is a novel of ideas, a novel about a family’s history, about someone’s
adolescence and about ‘nature vs. nurture’, it is also one of the funniest novels
I have ever read. While at first sight it might not be something one might expect
from the ‘memoirs’ of a hermaphrodite, this novel is laugh-out-loud funny very
often. Eugenides uses humour to underline the drama and while this has
potential for disaster, he does it with grace.
