BocelliOnline

[Willma]

This is the current Pulitzer prize winner in fiction. It is beautifully written, rich in details and flows nicely. It starts out in a small town in Asia Minor around 1920, inhabited by Greeks then overun and burned by the Turks. A brother and sister, sole surviving members of a family, escape aboard a French ship and make it to the U.S.A. - Detroit. During the crossing, they re-invent themselves as young lovers and are married by the ship captain. Once in Detroit, they look up a cousin, a gay woman still desparately in the closet, so they mutually keep one another's secrets. The bro/sister couple have two children and one of those children marry the daughter of the gay woman who is in a very unhappy marriage. The child of this union, Calliope, is the narrator of the story.

Calliope is born with a recessive gene on her 5th chromozone (I think I have this right) which makes her a hermaphrodite - having both male and female gentalia. This - credibly - goes unnoticed until puberty because the testicles are undescended and the penis is enclosed in the vaginal folds. "Cal" is considered a girl and their old Greek doctor, half-blind and overwhelmed with grief from the loss of his family in this same village years ago, rarely takes a close look at anything. At puberty, Cal does not develop breasts and does not get her period. She shoots up, becomes lanky and begins to grow facial hair - which, strangely enough, goes unnoticed because a lot of Greek women have this same problem. (Please, I don't mean to offend any Greeks out there.) The situation comes to a head when all comes to light; a doctor prepares to remove Cal's odd looking penis which she always refers to as a "crocus" and turn her into a "real" girl with hormone shots etc. Although always having been raised as a girl, she understands intuitively, that she is a boy.

This book is not crazy and it is not humorous. It is extraordinary. The author is able to separate gender and float it above the character. The Cal of the story is female. Cal, the narrator, is an adult male. It doesn't matter. We see this person change or bloom from one gender to the other. Even, as the adult male, the young female Cal emerges as an old and cherished friend. It is extremely fascinating and makes you take a look at gender in a way that is unique.

Behind all of this is an exploration of how individuals in this situation have been typically treated - most often, surgically, turned into conventional females. It had been previously thought that the "gender of rearing" was the true gender and this character proved that not to be so - that gender is a genetic determination and the genitalia is but one manifestation.

If you want something different and you want something great - this is a good choice.
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Although, in his life, he was often called the imbecile from Illinois, history has proven otherwise.