And so read it, I did, over one very, very wet week in Byron, during which the sky remained low and looming and grey, and I spent much of the week curled up on the sofa, candles flickering, tea in hand, as I lost myself in Eugenides much-loved modern classic. Over the years I’ve collected a handful of copies, and when I headed to Byron with a friend in November, I took it, promising I wouldn’t return to Bondi with a single page unread. One such book I did manage to tick of the list – and one that had been on my ever-growing reading pile ever since I first read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides when I lived in Los Angeles – was the author’s second book, and winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, Middlesex. Alas, I wasn’t, and while I read just shy of 90 books in total, as I often lament, I wish I had been more particular in selecting the books I chose to read. It was something of an ambitious list – but one that I should – and could – have finished, had I been more diligent in my reading. In Cal’s later life, he lives in Berlin, and references the reunification of the city following the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened only a few years before he takes up residence in the city.Towards the end of 2022, I looked at a list I had made last January of all the books I wanted to finish before the year was out. (This is, of course, not actually true, and is an example of the novel blending fiction with historical reality.) Subsequent historical events chronicled in the novel including the Detroit Race Riot of 1967 and the collapse of the auto industry in the city, leading to economic depression. Fard Muhammad, was actually Cal’s (fictional) maternal grandfather, Jimmy Zizmo. In one of the most unexpected historical references in the novel, Cal’s grandmother Desdemona gets a job working for the Nation of Islam, and it is revealed that the (real) founder of the movement, Wallace D. Later on, the novel depicts the boom of the automobile industry in Detroit, Michigan, alongside racial tensions between white residents and black residents, many of whom had originally immigrated to the city during the Great Migration of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North. As a result of this conflict, Cal’s grandparents Lefty and Desdemona-like so many others during this era-leave Europe in order to seek refuge and prosperity in the U.S. Some of the most important events that take place in the first part of the novel include World War I, the Greo-Turkish War, and the Turkish destruction of Smyrna.

Middlesex chronicles a large number of historical events, some of which take center stage while others are mentioned in a more passing or subtle manner.

Middlesex reissued jeffrey eugenides