Middlesex

“Tessie laughed the suggestion off. But behind her sarcasm was a serious moral reservation. To tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris.”

Tessie’s response to Milton’s desire to engineer the birth of a girl child is consistent with her cultural traditions. This foreshadows what’s to come: The parents ultimately have no control over the birth, gender, or identity of the child.

“And let’s not forget where they were dancing, in Bithynios, that mountain village where cousins sometimes married third cousins and everyone was somehow related, so that as they danced, they started holding each other more tightly, stopped joking, and then just danced together, as a man and a woman, in lonely and pressing circumstances, might sometimes do.”

The narrator’s explanation of his grandparents’ love story—brother and sister turned husband and wife—hinges on the circumstances of time and place. His origin story is intimately tied to theirs. Cal offers no judgment due to the war and his grandparents’ losses.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to resuscitate—for purely elegiac reasons and only for a paragraph—that city which disappeared, once and for all, in 1922. Smyrna endures today in a few rebetika songs and a stanza from The Waste Land.”

The narrator describes his grandparents’ flight from the burning city in an epic digression, wherein he lists the qualities and amenities of their ancient home. It signals that this will be an epic story—a device common to Homer’s works—and indicates the emotional cost of forced migration. In addition, the narrator references another epic poem, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, which provides another antecedent for his story. (Tiresias, the man who also lived as a woman for seven years, figures prominently in Eliot’s work.)