Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

We finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides this weekend. Boyfriend read the book out loud for me. It took us a week and a half and some Läkerol to go through the 630 pages.

This book is about a lot of different things. It's a family chronicle over three generations. It's about an incestuous marriage. It's about gender identity and chromosone mutations. It's about growing up. It's about Detroit.

Right away we were both very thrilled about the book. We loved the language (read the Swedish translation), were caught in curiosity and wanted to find out what was going to happen with everyone involved in the story, and laughed quite often at situations or comments. However, we found the book to be toooo long. Our edition had almost 640 pages in it and to be honest, this story could have been told in less pages than that.

We thought we would get to know more about the narrator Cal/Callie but to be honest, most of the book is about the rest of the family; grandparents and parents. Callie isn't even born for real until about 200 pages into the book, even if she pops up here and there through the storytelling and the flashbacks. There's also this thing about the narrator's ability to know what everyone thinks and feels. The story is told with an "I" as the main character but even so, he/she describes thoughts in other people's minds and also their feelings. That kept bugging me all through the book.

Starting out I thought this would be a 5-start-book but the rating went lower as we read on. I was hoping for it to all get tied up in the end and give me an answer to why all this was written, but that didn't happen. I'd rate this a 3-star-book but to be honest, some parts could be a 5 and others 1...