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“Part Tristram
Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, Cal is a wonderfully engaging
narrator…A deeply affecting portrait of one family’s tumultuous engagement with
the American twentieth century.”
— New York Times
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“[Eugenides] is well
on his way to becoming a spectacular mythologist, attacking some of our most
enduring riddles with heroic energy, keen wit, and genuine compassion…Everyone
we meet in Middlesex is vibrantly
alive…Eugenides has taken the greatest mystery of all—What are we, exactly, and
where do we come from?—and crafted a story that manages to be both illuminating
and transcendent.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
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“Rollicking,
gleefully inventive…Middlesex serves
as a tribute to Nabokovian themes…Eugenides recounts the revelation of Callie’s
genetic abnormality through a series of near-discoveries that are amazingly
comically missed.”
— Washington Post
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“[Middlesex is] one of the most impressive
American novels…Eugenides has created a spirited, high-energy comic epic.”
— Newsday
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“A big, cheeky,
splendid novel…It goes places few narrators would dare to tread…Lyrical and
fine.”
— Boston Globe
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“Unprecedented,
astounding…The most reliably American story there is: A son of immigrants
finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak.”
— San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
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“Middlesex is about a hermaphrodite in the way that Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel is about a teenage
boy…A novel of chance, family, sex, surgery, and America, it contains
multitudes.”
— Men’s Journal
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“An epic…This feast
of a novel is thrilling in the scope of its imagination and surprising in its
tenderness.”
— People
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“Vibrantly strange
and heroic…Nothing is simple in this bighearted, restless story, not even
choosing the right pronoun to describe the protean hero.”
— Entertainment Weekly
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“Tenderly rendered…It
also is a story of assimilation on a much more embracing, even epic, scale, a
story viewed through the scrims of psychology, the language of Middlesex pops, screeches, clatters with
noise and life, with the muffled moans of passion in an upstairs bedroom, the
siren whine and pounding thunder of Henry Ford’s assembly line, the sharp crack
of ice under the wheels of a rumrunner’s Packard, the trill of a clarinet solo piercing
a muggy summer night, the whole raucous booming-thudding-wailing soundtrack of
the century.”
— Miami Herald
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“Eugenides invites
one and all to populate the great Greek-American novel…Boisterous…With Middlesex, a mirror house love poem to
his Greek ‘family,’ Jeffrey Eugenides proves he has literary muscle second to
none.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
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“Poetic verve…He
evokes an entirely fresh shade of tough, enduring love…A revelation of
originality and vast invention.”
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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“At last Detroit has
its great novel. What Dublin got from James Joyce—a sprawling, ambitious,
loving, exasperated, and playful chronicle of all its good and bad parts—Detroit
has from native son Eugenides.”
— Detroit Free Press
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“Epic and wondrous…Middlesex begins as a generous,
tragicomic family chronicle of immigration and assimilation, becomes along the
way a social novel about Detroit, perhaps the most symbolic of American cities,
and incorporates a heartbreaking tale of growing up awkward and lonely in 70s
suburbia. It’s a big, affectionate, and often hilarious book.”
— Salon.com
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“Amazing…A modern
classic.”
— Oregonian
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“Big, funny,
flamboyantly imaginative…As warmhearted as it is unpredictable.”
— Arizona Republic
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“Middlesex is so fully imagined, so vivid, funny, touching, and
original, that it often left me grinning with delight.”
— San Jose Mercury News
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“Middlesex is also a pleasing mix of discussions of scientifically
exact genetics and Greek-American yarns. It is genetics as storytelling.”
— Vogue
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“An often affecting,
funny, and deeply human book…A charming ingenuous writer…Middlesex is an enormously ambitious book, whose many stories do
indeed gather to present a broad swath of Greek-American life.”
— New Republic
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“Eugenides does such
a superb job of capturing the ironies of trade-offs of assimilation that
Calliope’s evolution into Cal doesn’t feel sudden at all, but more like a
transformation we’ve been through ourselves.”
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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“[An] exercise in
narratological brio…Genuinely moving.”
— Times Literary Supplement (London)
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“Middlesex contains scenes that are as wonderful as written prose
can get…As it is, Eugenides has written a novel that you could give to your own
teenage sons and daughters so that they might better understand their passage
through the universal confusion of puberty.”
— Bookforum
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“Jeffrey Eugenides is a big and big-hearted talent, and Middlesex is a weird, wonderful novel that will sweep you off your feet.
— Jonathan Franzen
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The author is a gifted storyteller who relates 10 decades of one Greek family's life with evocative words and poignant images, which please the ear and mind. Kristoffer Tabori's dramatization gives a strong sense that he's savoring the telling.
— Audio File
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Without a doubt, this audio edition of Eugenide's long-awaited second novel represents an acme of the audiobook genre: the whole equals more than the sum of its parts…Tabori's performance of the text is phenomenal…Not only are his interpretations of the characters astonishingly credible, but his internalization of the narrative is nothing short of amazing.
— Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
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What made me fall in love with audiobooks was not so much the story (which is amazing), but rather the narration of the book done by Kristoffer Tabori. This performance, for me, elevated audiobooks from a convenient way to get more books ‘read' to an actual performance art.
— Brain Candy Book Reviews