Middlesex!

Of all joys the most blessed: I found Middlesex! One day I just walked into the library, resolved to just get my Sandman fix and leave without looking, and there it was on a special stand.

It was worth the trauma. I didn't really know what to expect - the book had attracted me on the fluidity of its writing, and this continued to impress me. It was a very easy read - in the way that Alexandre Dumas or Victor Hugo is an easy read. They might be long, but the words just zip off the page in a way more concice novelists such as Jane Austen don't. In other words, I could skim read it - and I got through the tome in two four hour sessions.

There was something necessarily artificial about its history - the scenes such as Smyrna or the race riots were convincingly written, but as soon as we got to a subject I knew something about, I saw through the trick at once. I've been to Ellis Island, and his description matched almost line by line the guided tour we took. But that isn't necessarily a great crime.

The most striking thing about this book was its sense of culture. Cal is on the divide between male and female - but she is also a Greek-American, and Eugenides never let us forget it. Hence we get American cars, American race riots, American schools and shops clashing with Greek traditions, names, meals and incessant Homer references. I liked them - not only because they made me feel smug - but in the way they were used. The occasional "sing muse" was basic enough, but the description "wine dark" - always applied to the sea by Homer - was used of a car. I thought that was very impressive - subtle, but also cool. There's this concept of the Great American Novel - a book actually about America itself - and with the generations counting down from 1920 to the 1980s, at times this was what it seemd to be. Wikipedia suggests it is the equivalent of a national epic, which I rather like. It also suggests that Cal's coming of age is intertwined with the saga of her family - I disagree entirely. If anything, Cal is secondary, and the main interest seems to be changing country and the passing times. Maybe it is significant that an adult Cal has chosen to leave her birth country and move from place to place instead.

In many ways it reminded me of Lolita - another classic on The List which zings off the page in a similar style. Nabokov slips subtle literary references all the way through his book - from addressing Lolita as "Miranda" when asking if she remembers an inn, to getting his childhood sweetheart who he knew by the sea mixed up with the poetical figure Annabel-Lee.

Characters? Well, the opening romance between Lefty and Desdemona was adorable, but while the Callie-Obscure Object relationship was filled with all the unfufilled longing of true love, it was all a bit generic.

Incidentally, in looking for some interesting opinions on the book, I found the New York Review of books had said almost the same thing as me: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15794. Which makes it right.

So that's another one down. Right now, I am finishing The Castle of Otranto and Vathek - two gothic novels I have already half-started and got bored with at various times. It didn't help that my English teacher mocked Otranto mercilessly to give us a good idea of what the gothic was when we began to study the genre. I have difficulty taking it seriously now - plus, the absence of speech marks or indents makes skimming it, or reading it at any speed at all, almost impossible. I'm looking forward to Vathek more - it dips into the same stylised hedonism as Picture of Dorian Gray does, and Byron called it his "Bible".

Incidentally, I looked out the cinematic equivalent of this list - 1001 films to see before you die, second edition. I watch films at a prolific rate - for example, I watched three yesterday. I'm 16% done on that, and I've been deliberately watching classic/highbrow movies for several years now...does this mean anything?