Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Nationality: American
Year Published: 2002
On This List Because: Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003
Primary Location: Detroit, MI
Secondary Locations: Bithynios, Asia Minor
Smyrna, Asia Minor
San Francisco, CA
New York, NY
Edition I Read: Paperback, after it had won the Pulitzer, but not the Oprah edition. The cover with people looking out from a boat, and Detroit upside down in red below. I got it from the library.
First Sentence: I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Sexiness
I found this to be a super sexy book. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am in love with Desdemona Stephanides, who spends half the book as an old woman. I read most of this book in the lineups for TIFF, and was scared that people would realize I was reading about an incestuous marriage including a woman I was in love with because of her dark braids and shapely figure. Also sexy: young Calliope’s crush on the Obscure Object, who smoked and brushed her teeth at the same time. And the Clarinet vibrations that Milt administered to Tess. I felt like a middle-aged woman reading a romance novel.