BOOK OF MONTH JUNE 2021

Middlesex
A Novel
by Jeffrey Eugenides

About the Book

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of
the Greek-Amer-ican Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to
Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out
to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she
has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most
audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fi ction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating
reinvention of the American epic.

About the Author

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin
Suicides, was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for
his work. In 2003, Jeffrey Eugenides received The Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middle-sex (Picador, 2003). Middlesex,
which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, France’s Prix
Medicis, has sold over 1 million copies.

Place for Notes

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Discussion Questions

1. What are some conflicts and main conflict in this novel?

2. Which part of this novel makes you feel uncomfortable or maybe shocked?

3. What effect do place and immigration have on the novel?

4. Calliope is the name the classical Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry. What elements of Greek mythology
figure in Cal’s story?

5. Watching from the cab, Milton came face-to-face with the essence of tragedy, which is something de-termined before you’re
born, something you can’t escape or do anything about, no matter how hard you try.”

According to this definition, is Cal’s story a tragedy?

6. Does the house ( Middlesex) have a symbolic function in the novel? How is it connected with the name of the
novel?

("Middlesex! Did anybody ever live in a house as strange? As sci-fi? As futuristic and outdated at the same time? A
house that was more like communism, better in theory than reality? The walls were pale yellow, made of octagonal
stone blocks framed by redwood siding along the roofline. Plate glass windows ran along the front. Hudson Clark
(whose name Milton would drop for years to come, despite the fact that no one ever recognized it) had designed
Middlesex to harmonize with the natural surroundings. In this case, that meant the two weeping willow trees and the
mulberry growing against the front of the house. Forgetting where he was (a conservative suburb) and what was on
the other side of those trees (the Turnbulls and the Picketts), Clark followed the principles of Frank Lloyd Wright,
banishing the Victorian vertical in favor of a midwestern horizontal, opening up the interior spaces, and bringing in a
Japanese influence. Middlesex was a testament to theory uncompromised by practicality."

7. Who has more impact to human behaviour - Nature or Enviroment?

8. Did you have a favorite passage (or passages) from the book? Which one?

9. Gender identity. Are we ready to accept that every person can change his/her gender in order to feel more
comfortable in his/her body? Or maybe only nature can do it?

10. What does the novel, as a whole, say about the concept of love? Is love something that is chosen by us or
chooses us?

Conclusion Quote

Desdemona was still looking at me but her eyes had gone dreamy. She was smiling. And then she said, “My spoon was right.”

“I guess so.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry this happen to you.”

“It’s all right.”

“I’m sorry, honey mou.”

“I like my life,” I told her. “I’m going to have a good life.”

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Translation Corner
Silently Tessie inserted the links, tragedy in one sleeve, comedy in the other.

As we came out of the hotel that morning they glittered in the early morning sun, and under the influence

of those two-sided accessories, what happened next took on contrasting tones.

There was tragedy, certainly, in Milton’s expression as they left me off at the library.

During Milton’s time away, his image of me had reverted to the girl I’d been a year earlier.

Now he faced the real me again. He saw my ungainly movements as I climbed the library steps, the

broadness of my shoulders inside my Papagallo coat.

Watching from the cab, Milton came face-to-face with the essence of tragedy, which is something

determined before you’re born, something you can’t escape or do anything about, no matter how hard

you try.

And Tessie, so used to feeling the world through her husband, saw that my problem was getting worse,

was accelerating.

Their hearts were wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the

capacity for love that parenthood brings, in a cuff link set all its own.