"Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!"

[saavedra77]

A coworker recommended Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex several weeks ago, and from the moment that I scanned the book's first page, I found myself scarcely able to put the damned thing down. I haven't been this fascinated, this absorbed by a book since I finished Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, last year.

And Middlesex has so much to offer: one of those sprawling, multigenerational family sagas I've always been drawn to; a powerful sense of history; a thoughtful treatment of gender politics--all of it woven together via a network of sexually-charged allusions to Greek mythology (Tiresius, the Minotaur, Zeus and Hera, etc).

As with many a beloved story, of course, I started having something like withdrawal pangs as soon as I got to the end.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a firm believer in endings, I respect where this novel ended. I just wish that I always had such rewarding reading to hand.

Comments

[aztecson23.livejournal.com]

Hey.

Yeah, I've been wanting to read _Middlesex_ for a while. I'm looking for summer reading material; this sounds like it'll go on my list.

I was very close to buying A.S. Byatt's _Possession_ and _Notes from a Scandal_ (both have been made into movies, I know. Ever since I saw the movie version of _Howard's End_, I realized that definitely the "book is better than the movie" and all that, but not just because movies distort aspects of the book; also because I found that I enjoyed getting lost in the characters' psychological motivations, which may be described for pages, the plot set up, and of course, in the novel[H.'s End] you get the out of no-where, ironic narrator.

In movies, even in good movies like Merchant Ivory's adaption of Forster's novel, the time constraints and the sort of "distance" of the charatcers---meaning that their interiority can only be reflected by their facial expressions rather than by entering their minds directly----as well as the other technical differences between the mediums of film and text conspire together to reduce the story to visuals and dialogue(in film), which is in a feat in itself: to do the book justice within these media parameters.)

As for me, I want dense and lush and syntax, not just the bare bones of visual representation and spoken words.

Anyway, that's enough "about-to-graduate-as-an-english-major" verbiage.

How are you?

[sarrabellum.livejournal.com]

I read Middlesex a couple of years ago, and I felt the same way about it.