Just a quickie

It snowed here, finally, and my kids are loving it! And so am I!! The snow began last week but I was hesitant to celebrate because so far this winter, whatever fell from heavens melted in a day. Hurray -- last week's snowfall is still on the ground and it's been slowly piling up all week. Hubby and I took Sweetness & Light tobagganing and "weeeeeeeeeeeee", I went down the hill, too!! I felt about 8 years old.

I'm so into this book - Middlesex by Jefferey Euginides -- that I've neglected my blog, my writing, my kids, my husband, my sleep...
I'm not sure I would have picked it out of a bin at Chapters (though, technically, I did pick it out of a bin at Costco!!), because the blurb really doesn't do it for me. It's basically about a guy named Cal, a hermaphrodite, who narrates the story of the life of his grandparents, their immigration from Greece (insert Greek/Turk politics/wars/social strife), then moves onto the life of his parents, then his birth as a girl.... (I have to stop now because I'm only 1/2 thru the book).
If I hadn't heard a bit of buzz, if it hadn't won the Pulitzer, if it hadn't been an obscenely low price, I would have passed.
Thank goodness for small miracles! The prose is beautiful, the characters well-rounded, sympathetic and rich. I can almost feel Cal's grandmother's thick braids.
This is not a fast action story to skim, but a savour-every-word piece of art. I've reread several passages, just to wrap my head around the imagery.
Middlesex hasn't kept me up until the wee hours flipping pages madly, but it has kept me up at night thinking about the characters, their inner strength and struggles, and how so many in the world have similar stories to tell -- yet by and large, we, the general populace, remain happily ignorant of these situations (that isn't a jibe, just the truth).
Like Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, this one is going to stick with me a long time. . .