Beef up your vocabulary with Middlesex

I think some authors write novels with an electronic thesaurus wedged firmly by their sides. They also make mind maps. And conduct a lot of research. And suffer severe headaches from writing intelligently crafted sentences.

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex is one meandering weighty tome of a novel spanning three generations about a Greek hermaphrodite finding herself/ himself and eventually being true to herself/ himself.

I wonder what inspired Eugenides to this style of narrating, with all its intricacies, information overload and zipping back and forth in time. It could even qualify as a time traveller's tale.

My friend (a girl) said she could relate to the narrator of the story, Calliope Stephanides, and had always held her/ him as a hero.

I wonder what the hell she meant by that. Mmm... Maybe she (or he) is dropping a hint.

But yes, I can tell, there is indeed a lot of confusion with oneself and this big scary world. Like being Calliope the hermaphrodite in the story.

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