Middlesex

By: Jeffrey Eugenides

Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori

Length: 21 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs is a rare genetic mutation - and a guilty secret - that have followed Callie's grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family's second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the gene's epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.

Spanning eight decades - and one unusually awkward adolescence - Jeffrey Eugenides' long-awaited second novel is a grand, original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.

Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Audie Award for best unabridged fiction, Middlesex marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.

Check out more selections from Oprah's Book Club.

©2002 Jeffrey Eugenides (P)2002 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC

Critic reviews

Audie Award Winner, Fiction (Unabridged), 2003

"Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart. Highly recommended." (Library Journal )

"Not only are his interpretations of the characters astonishingly credible, but his internalization of the narrative is nothing short of amazing." (Publishers Weekly)

"A towering achievement...a story that manages to be both illuminating and transcendent...[Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer many of us suspected him of being." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Not what I was expecting

What did you love best about Middlesex?

What I liked most was when the book started out I thought, "OMG what did I get". I hung in there a bit and was pleasantly surprised. I have no doubt that if I had been reading this myself I would have put the book down but Tabori did such a remarkable narration that I was drawn into the characters and wanted to find out what happens next.

What did you like best about this story?

The narrator.

Have you listened to any of Kristoffer Tabori’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

First one.

If you could rename Middlesex, what would you call it?

Body doesn't matter.

Don't pass this up!!

You read incest and think yuck...
You read hermaprodite and think yuck...
You read "hard-to-follow" Greek names and think yuck..

I was you. I was wrong. Don't pass this book up. It earned the Pulitzer for a reason and I'm so glad I overcame my own reservations and gave it a chance. What a tale the author tells! The narrator, btw, is absolutely wondeful. I loved the entire experience.

Kip

Excellent

I don't know quite what I expected when I purchased this book. The writing was excellent. The writers knowledge of cultural history and the ability to take you back to other decades made the story very believeable. I got lost in this book.

Very interesting book, ho-hum performance

The book itself is very well-written. The narration, however, was not so great. The characterization of the voices was dialectally incongruous, which was distracting. But the most annoying aspect was the cheesy musical interlude at the end of every chapter that would drown out the narration. Please stop!

Great book, but...

The narrator about killed me. Yes, he did a good job with the emotion of the story - but he made every single character; young, old, male, female; sound like a middle aged Jewish man from a Seinfeld episode. That was irritating and exhausting.

middlesex (unabridged)

I loved this book so much! I couldn't stop listening.

Brilliant

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, the way the story unfolded and how it drew you in with the characters seeming so real. The humor and the overall story telling was excellent, the author truly has a way with words.

entertaining, but terrible narration

the reading of this book is so irritating that it really detracted from my enjoyment of this otherwise entertaining and interesting book. the way the narrator comically exaggerated his voice in order to mimic little girls, old greek ladies, etc... would often be so grating and harsh that you couldn't help from being taken out of the story, which itself is really absorbing. i admit i didn't listen to the sample before i got it. i'm still happy i did, but i kind of wish i'd read it instead.

Great BOOK!

This book wasn't at all what I expected. I loved the rich, detailed history. It never dragged on and was unpredictable (in the best way). The narrator was wonderful, too.

Conflicted

Mild spoilers, but not really if you read the description. Honestly, I really enjoyed this story. From Desdemona and Lefty leaving Turkey for America to Cal in Germany, the story of this person and family were well written and interesting. Though this book felt (and was) extremely long, I never lost interest in the story, even as I sometimes wished it would get to the point. I do feel somewhat conflicted about the circumstances of Cal’s transition from living as female to living as male. While I’m not intersex myself, neither is the author and I wonder how realistic it is for an intersex person who was raised with a particular gender identity to decide to live as the other when there had really not been any gender confusion or body dysmorphia up until that point. It feels as if Callie dons Cal as a disguise but never returns to Callie. I like the story for what it is, and a lot of my other concerns about the story being inauthentic to intersex people were somewhat resolved by the end. I would be interested in hearing what an intersex person’s views on how realistic Cals experience is.