Bisexuality - An epic with many meanings

Phuong Nam Publishing Company has published the novel Middlesex by Greek-American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. A book of such great volume, its title easily misleads readers into thinking that it is a book about the third gender, which is a current issue. Not entirely so, Middlesex transcends many semantic layers to become a multi-meaning epic, very worth reading!

Right from the beginning, the novel immediately evokes the reader's sympathy for the protagonist who is constantly worried about his fate: "I was born twice: first, as a girl, on an unusually smog-free day in Detroit in January 1960; then again, as a teenager, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August 1974." In a humorous tone, Intersex tells the story of the Stephanides family, with their incestuous grandfather and grandmother who immigrated to America to live through the Depression. Then there are the father and mother who are cousins, and finally the teenage granddaughter who falls in love with another girl...

The thread that guides the story in The Two Worlds spans three generations of a Greek-American family, starting with the life of Calliope Stephanides, going back to the past. Going from a small village in Asia Minor to the Detroit metropolitan area during the Great Depression, the narrator - Miss Calliope, or Mr. Cal - gradually reveals to the reader the contradictions within herself, the conflicts in her family, the changes in social life, exposing deep personal secrets, the psychological trauma in an immigrant family, and more broadly, the explosion of the American dream in the face of the changes of the times.

The Bisexual not only recreates the fate of a Greek immigrant family but also generalizes the common fate of the world in the face of historical problems. It moves from the uncertainty of an individual searching for his true self to the universal fate of wanderers searching for national identity.

Bisexuality is a worthy epic with many layers of meaning. Global current issues are encapsulated in one flow: Gender freedom, ethnic issues - equality between skin colors, immigration - refugee issues...

MERCURY

Source: https://baokhanhhoa.vn/van-hoa/202401/luong-gioi-mot-bo-su-thi-da-nghia-aba4daa/