Middlesex (2002) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

show spoilers

Characters/People edit see section history

• Calliope Stephanides: Calliope, who changes her name to Cal when she assumes a male identity, is the narrator of the story. She claims that she has a male brain but was assumed to be female at birth. Cal establishes a connection between herself and her family when she admits, "my grandparents had fled their home because of a war. Now, some fifty-two years later, I was fleeing myself." She joins the foreign service because she cannot have children and because she does not want to stay in one place for too long, fearing that her gender will be discovered.
• Object of Desire: Cal names the Object of Desire after a famous European film. The Object is part of the popular clique in Cal's private school, whose members ordinarily shun ethnic girls like Cal. But the Object's loneliness, caused by parents who pay little attention to her, encourages her to begin a friendship with Cal that eventually turns sexual. The Object gives into her feelings for Cal but expresses her insecurities and frustration about her lesbian tendencies when she declares, "You understand everything I say. Why can't you be a guy?"
• Desdemona Stephanides: Cal's grandmother, Desdemona, is "perfectly designed for blocking people's paths" as she tries to maintain her family's ties to the old world. She reveals a sense of the dramatic whenever she is crossed by fanning herself with her "six atrocity fans" that list crimes committed against Greece. Cal notes: "the ominous, storm-gathering quality" of her fanning becomes "her secret weapon" in this battle.
• Eleutherios Stephanides: Eleutherios, or Lefty as he was known, is Cal's grandfather and Desdemona's husband. His nonconformist nature becomes evident when he frequents gambling and prostitution houses in Greece and convinces his sister to marry him. After he gambles away his money, he and Desdemona live in the attic of Cal's house; he spends his mornings translating Greek poems, while at night he smokes hash in a hookah. Cal develops a close relationship with her "Chaplinesque papou," with his elegant clothes and playful nature.
• Milton Stephanides: Milton is Cal's father and Desdemona's son. He possesses "a flinty self-confidence that protected him like a shell from the world's assaults." Of the family members, he assimilates most successfully: he learns American jazz and business sense. He distances himself further from his homeland when he adopts right-wing politics, identifies with Nixon, and supports the United States so much that he denounces his Greek heritage. His obsession with the American dream distances him from his family as he becomes more preoccupied with his business worries. Cal notes "he began to leave a little more of himself at the diner each day" until he "wasn't really there at all."
• Tessie Stephanides: Tessie Stephanides, born Tessie Zizmo, is Cal's mother. Milton is attracted to her "all-American looks." She is quiet and, like Cal, enjoys watching people. After building her world around her family, she starts to feel useless when Chapter Eleven goes off to college and Cal matures. After Cal leaves, Tessie becomes depressed because her intense motherly devotion is frustrated. That same devotion, however, causes her to accept Cal's sex change from female to male, from a daughter to a son.
• Sourmelina Stephanides: Sourmelina, called Lina, is Desdemona's and Lefty's cousin. Her parents send her to the United States when they discover that she is a lesbian. She successfully assimilates American culture yet retains some ties to her heritage. When she thinks her husband, Jimmy, is dead, she grieves in the Greek style.
• Michael Antoniou: Father Mike, assistant priest at the Greek Orthodox church the family attends, married Zoë, Milton's sister, after Tessie broke off her engagement with him. He is sweet-natured before he marries Zoë, but her constant nagging about how successful her brother is compared to him wears him down and turns him bitter. In a desperate attempt to get enough money to leave Zoë and to get even with Milton for his success in business and in marriage, Father Mike tries to blackmail him.
• Chapter Eleven: Chapter Eleven is the only name that Cal gives to her older brother. As a child, he likes to shoot, hammer, and smash things. He becomes geeky and nerdy as a teenager but turns into a "John Lennon look-alike" at college where he adopts anti-war and anti-establishment views. He ignores Cal for most of her life since they are far apart in age, but the two become closer when Chapter Eleven faces the Vietnam draft. He ultimately shows his loyalty when he rescues Cal from jail in California. His lack of business sense, however, causes him to ruin his father's hot dog franchise.
• Jerome: Jerome, the Object's brother, is the first boy with whom Cal has sex. He seems to want to have a relationship with Cal, but after Cal rebuffs him, he turns on her and his sister with cruel epithets when he catches them together.
• Zora Khyber: Zora Khyber, a hermaphrodite that works at the sex club, is sympathetic to Cal's gender confusion and so spends a lot of time sharing her extensive research with her. She has a marked violent streak, however, that frightens Cal.
• Julie Kikuchi: Cal's relationship with Julie Kikuchi, a thirty-six-year-old Asian-American living in Berlin, appears in brief glimpses throughout the text. She is straightforward, asking Cal as soon as she meets her if she is gay. Julie's open-mindedness is evident when she is willing to begin a relationship with Cal after Cal admits that she is a hermaphrodite.
• Dr. Peter Luce: Dr. Luce diagnoses Cal in New York and writes up her case and publishes it. Although he is considered the world's leading authority on hermaphroditism, he misdiagnoses the causes of the condition. Extremely confident in his medical theories, the "brilliant, charming, work-obsessed" Luce, nevertheless "prayed," Cal assumes, that she "would never show up to refute them."
• Bob Presto: Bob Presto runs the sex club where Cal works. He appears to be sympathetic and kind-hearted when he rescues Cal after she is beaten up by the homeless men, but his ultimate goal is financial.
• Clementine Stark: Clementine, Cal's first friend in Grosse Pointe, teaches her how to kiss properly and causes Cal's first feelings of gender confusion.
• Zoë Stephanides: Zoë Stephanides, called Aunt Zo, is Desdemona's and Lefty's daughter, and Cal's aunt. She marries Father Mike by default when Tessie breaks off her engagement with him. Characterized by her good sense of humor and loud talk, she is uncomfortable with the prospect of being a role model as Father Mike's wife. Her jealousy over her brother's good fortune and Mike's obvious affection for Tessie turns Aunt Zo into a nag who constantly berates Mike for his shortcomings. She "never missed a chance to lament her marriage" to him.
• Jimmy Zizmo: Jimmy, who is of unknown ethnic origin, is married to Lina. He is an ex-con, drug dealer, and scam artist whose adaptability becomes evident when he turns quickly from rum-running to proselytizing as the head prophet of the Nation of Islam in Detroit.
• Dr. Philobosian: The family doctor from Greece who moves to Michigan and continues to practice medicine into his old age. Due to his old fashioned medical practice, he over looks problems.
• Mr. Da Silva: Advanced English Teacher at Callie's private school for girls. He chooses The Object to play Antigone and Callie as Tiresias in the Greek Tragedy Antigone put on by his class. During rehearsals these two classmates begin a many-faceted relationship, starting as Best Friends.
• Sophie Sassoon: Owner of a beauty shop where Callie gets her mustache waxed.
• Rex Reese: A moneyed teenager and potential suitor of The Object. While drunk, he drove into the lake in Grosse Pointe, and the girl who was with was killed. He swam to the shore, and the girl was trapped in the car and drowned.
• Dr. Bauer: A gynecologist who was the father of one of The Object's friends. The Object calls Dr. Bauer a total pervert. Callie's mother makes an appointment with Dr. Bauer for Callie.
• Peter Tatakis: Friend of Callie's parents. He and his wife Phyllis come over for Sunday dinner with the Stephanides family. Peter drives a wine dark Buick.
• Scheer: Add a description of this character.
• Maxine
• Marius
• Morrison
• Wanda
• Phillips
• Kontraindikationen
• Beulah

Quotes edit see section history

• “p.518 I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.”

  Cal

• “Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.”

• “But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.”

• “Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”

• “Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line.”

• “Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.

  Highlighted by 186 Kindle customers

• Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

  Highlighted by 106 Kindle customers

• Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.

  Highlighted by 105 Kindle customers

• Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line.

  Highlighted by 86 Kindle customers

• I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.

  Highlighted by 78 Kindle customers

• And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

  Highlighted by 68 Kindle customers

• But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.

  Highlighted by 63 Kindle customers

• So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

  Highlighted by 62 Kindle customers

• We were ready to accept the Negroes. We weren’t prejudiced against them. We wanted to include them in our society if they would only act normal!

  Highlighted by 59 Kindle customers

• obstreperous.” Tessie smiled. “You have quite a vocabulary.” At this compliment the girl broke into a big smile. “ ‘Obstreperous’ is my favorite word. My brother is very obstreperous.

  Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Grosse Pointe, Michigan
• Detroit, Michigan
• Berlin
• San Francisco, California
• Asia Minor
• Smyrna, Turkey
• Petoskey, Michigan
• Greece
• Bursa
• New York, NY
• Bithynios
• Paris
• Canada
• Florida
• Athens
• Cyprus
• Greektown
• Lima

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Self-discovery: Describe this theme.
• Sexual Identity
• Coming of Age

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by The Road, and followed by Love in the Time of Cholera.

Preceded by Empire Falls, and followed by The Known World.

Preceded by The Pelican Brief, and followed by The Lord of the Rings.

Preceded by Shroud, and followed by Youth.

Preceded by A Time to Kill, and followed by The Twilight Saga, Complete Collection.

Preceded by The Client, and followed by A Time to Kill.

Preceded by The Count of Monte Cristo, and followed by The Giving Tree.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Jeffrey Eugenides (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. William Webb (Cover Artist)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Pulitzer Prize (2003: Fiction)
• Ambassador Book Award (2003: Fiction)
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Finalist: Fiction)
• Stonewall Book Award (2003: Honor Book in Literature)
• International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (Finalist, 2004, Short list)
• National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist, 2002: Fiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Sexual content and some language.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( E ) › Eugenides, Jeffrey
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history