In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia--back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Middlesex, by the much praised Jeffrey Eugenides, presents a huge problem for any reader. Its narrator, a Greek-American born with ambiguous genitalia, spent her/his childhood as an (allegedly) gorgeous little girl, but on discovering at adolescence that he was genetically a boy, transformed Callie into Cal. Kristoffer Tabori does many things well, but at no point does his manly voice sound as if it were ever a pretty little girl's. Further, his Greeks don't sound Greek, and his Cal talks with the same whiny accent as his Greek-born Granny, although Cal was born in Detroit and educated at a fancy Grosse Pointe private school. Both this novel and this production fail to convince or even entertain very much. Seriously disappointing. B.G. 2003 Audie Award Winner (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine
AudioFile...
Without a doubt, this audio edition of Eugenides's long-awaited second novel (after The Virgin Suicides) represents an acme of the audiobook genre: the whole equals much more than the sum of its parts...Tabori's performance of the text is phenomenal...
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.
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