Greekness

[g_the_curious]

"I'm not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness. The lesson of Desdemona's suffering and rejection of life insisted that old age would not continue the manifold pleasures of youth but would instead be a long trial that slowly robbed life of

Comments

[travisezell]

I'm not Greek, I admit, but Middlesex for me was a fantastically written book that went nowhere and meant nothing. Or rather, meant so many things that it didn't feel like there was one thematic thread tying it all together for me. Too... all over the place.

What'd you think?

[g_the_curious]

The main thematic thread was the emigration and evolution of a Greek family. How they came here from Smyrna in the 1920 and evolved into what they are today. As such, it examines the tapestry and timeline of modern America through non-American eyes. The fact that they are Greek made the book all the more familiar to me.

The second theme is humanizing the intersex naarator/author. You and I probably don't suffer from the biases of most people with regards to intersexed people, but the majority of the world does, and the biases and hatreds towards intersexed people are probably far more severe than those against 'ordinary' gays and lesbians.

Finally, I might draw a theme of consequences--consequences of our actions that may take a very long time to play out. The consequences of an incestious marriage weren't seen for two generations. That and the whole "who we are" question goes far beyond our immediate existence and encompasses people and events that came before us, long before we were born.