5.24.2011

Is it October yet?


Just last week I read Middlesex, the 2003 Pulitzer winner. I may be one of the last book bloggers to discover the magic that is Eugenides - he is truly amazing. Then I read about his latest work, The Marriage Plot, which will be released in October of this year. Then just yesterday The Millions released the opening lines of his latest novel and I don't think I've been this excited about a new release since I was 13 and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets came out. Really.

Via The Millions, the opening passage of The Marriage Plot:
To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic.”

13 comments:

  1. What a great excerpt! I have Middlesex on my shelf TBR...haven't experienced Eugenides yet! I guess I need to. :)

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  2. YES. I love him, Middlesex is one of my favorite books, and I'm SUPER excited about The Marriage Plot, too. And I just reviewed The Virgin Suicides last week.

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  3. Yes, I read that too! I cannot wait. It's certainly one of my most anticipated titles of the year!

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  4. I'm reading Middlesex right now and loving it!

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  5. Wow, great opener. That character is a girl after my own heart (but I have more Trollope on my shelves. Well, the TBR shelves actually. And not so much Henry James. . . but lots of Wharton!)

    I would read that book just based on that paragraph, even if I hadn't loved Middlesex, which I could not put down.

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  6. I had no idea he had another book coming - welcome to life in the middle of nowhere. I devoured Middlesex a few years ago, can't wait to see what he's come up with now.

    -- Ellen

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  7. I feel the exact same way. Dying to read this!

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  8. I was a goner when Edith Wharton came up. Rock on, October!

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  9. While I appreciate and share your enthusiasm for Eugenides, please let's not rush October-I'm not even done with this school year yet, much less ready to be two months into a new one :)

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  10. I need an ARC of this SO BAD right now

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  11. Thanks for quoting that passage, Brenna! I haven't read any Eugenides book yet. This passage is so awesome, that I want to read his new book now! Can't wait for it to come out!

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  12. Can't wait to read this new one! I loved Middlesex and have anxiously been awaiting something else from Eugenides! Great opener too - thanks for sharing it!

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