Next?

Just wonderin' what our next books gunna be.

middle aged white dude

I wanted to talk about the fact that the author of Middlesex is Jeffrey Eugenides, a white dude. He obviously did a lot of research for this book, or at least I gather that from the people he thanks (there seemed to be a myriad of authors of publications on intersexedness). However I always get this weird twing when I think about who wrote this book, a seemingly privileged middle aged white guy who went to Brown for his undergrad then Stanford and who now teaches at Princeton. AND of course I CAN judge this guy based on the schools he went to, he ethnicity, and what he looks like (he's bald).

Then I have to take into account that this is a story, a product of fiction. But I think that sometimes things are not that clear cut. Eugenides is himself Greek.

I am reminded of another really good book about personal experience that was written by someone far from who you would expect, Memoirs of a Geisha. And yeah... that's all.

I guess I'm just amazed and horrified and in awe, some how all at the same time.

Stupid book reviewers!

I just read a review of middlesex by the New York Review of books and this reviewer really ripped it apart. I found middlesex to be a thoroughly enjoyable book. This reviewer claimed that the story was rich in detail ("like all immigrant stories") in the beginning but that Cal himself was a weak plot line.
He states:
"rather than being more than usually nuanced insights into sex roles and gender behavior, as one would hope to have from a narrator who's so pointedly identified with Teiresias, the characterization of boys as inherently oversexed and violence-loving—traits that Callie, as she becomes a teenager, finds she shares, and that appear meant to justify her feeling that she is "really" a boy—are hardly nuanced. (They're the product of what you could safely call cultural monovision.) And to declare that "desire [for a girl] made me cross over to the other side"—i.e., to being a boy—seems awfully naive in this day and age, positing a kind of essentialism about sexuality and erotic affect that is equally unsubtle. (Why is it the case that Callie's attraction to girls "means" she's a boy? Couldn't she simply be gay?) We may not know much about Callie by the end of this book, but we certainly get a glimpse into how Eugenides thinks. "Breasts have the same effect on me as on anyone with my testosterone level," the adult Cal boasts, a claim that will surely come as a surprise to Eugenides's (presumably testosterone-rich) gay male readership.

I suspect that Eugenides has fallen back on such unthinking clichés for the same reason that Callie and Cal remain so unformed: in the end, he hasn't figured out what might go on inside the head of someone who's had Callie's experiences. This vacuum at the center of his book accounts for a general sense of deflation toward the end, when some weighty climactic aperçus start racking up. But do you really read a 529-page novel that sets out to explore the most profound realm of human experience merely to find out, in its closing pages, that "normality wasn't normal" or that "what really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death"?"

So what makes this reviewer so angry? That an intersexed person's experience with gender has to be a sideshow? That it has to be agony? That Eugenides has to dwell on Cal's experiences of being intersexed while the people around him are what shaped him is what I think matters.

Ok... this made more sense in my head. I think its the hang over stopping it from being good. More later.

Damnit.

I think this book is making me depressed. I may have to stagger it with trashy romance novels. I'm 3/4th of the way done. I cant put it down!

dude

Why is Chapter Eleven's name Chapter Eleven?  Is there some sort of reference that I'm not getting?