About this Item
used hardcover in a dust jacket. jacket is slightly worn about the edges, but with no tears and not price clipped. pages and binding are clean, straight and tight. there are no marks to the text or other serious flaws. this is a first printing, signed by the author on the title page. Seller Inventory # 1378495
Bibliographic Details
Title: Middlesex: A Novel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux September 2002
Publication Date: 2002
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: SIGNED / VG
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Signed By Author
Edition: 1st Edition.
About this title
The book's wily narrator and central character, Calliope Stephanides (named after the muse of epic poetry) is a hermaphrodite raised as a girl who comes to realise she is happier as a boy and is now living as a man in contemporary Berlin. Cal's tale begins, appropriately enough, in Greece (or more precisely Asia Minor)--an Aegean Strasbourg whose sovereignty is claimed by Greece and Turkey. In 1922 brother and sister Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides escaped their war-torn homeland and arrived, as man and wife, in Detroit, America. It is this coupling that ultimately begets their grandchild Calliope and her ambiguous sexuality, as she, or rather by then he, sanguinely notes:
Some people inherit houses; others painting or highly insured violin bows. Still others get Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.As Cal recounts the experiences of the Stephanides clan in their new land--from the Depression to Nixon--he unfurls his own symbiotic odyssey to a new sex. Cal's narrative voice is arch, humorous and self aware, continually drawing attention to its authorial sleights of hand, but never exasperating. This is big, brainy novel--The Oracle of Delphi puts in an unlikely appearance in the middle of a teenage tryst--but one full of compassion. Eugenides' astonishingly rich story persistently engages the heart as well as the mind. --Travis Elborough
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Store Description
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