Journal Entry 1 by Fantasma from Carnaxide, Lisboa (distrito) Portugal on Friday, December 23, 2011

It’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead – charismatic loner and college Darwinist – suddenly turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus – who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange – resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they have learned. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives. 

Journal Entry 2 by Fantasma at Carnaxide, Lisboa (distrito) Portugal on Monday, January 23, 2012

I only give 2 stars to this book because the 2nd half wasn't as bad as the 1st, or it wouldn't have more than 1 star.
I was really looking forward to this book as I loved Middlesex, and I don't know if that helped to the big disappointment that it was. The story is boring, almost all of it totally uninteresting, and I couldn't care less about the characters, as they were irritating, totally obnoxious.
There are some brilliant sentences, some beautiful parts (I don't think JE can write bad), but most of it is dull and it seems a course in Semiotics studies (and I'm still thinking what are Semiotics studies...) and in being a college student in the 80's - even though if all students were like the ones we know about, I would never want to know any of them, moreover spending hours in class with them! The course and the students sounded pretentious and (have I said it??) obnoxious. That 1st part of the book has no real story, and I missed most of what was written there. Eugenides uses 10 pages to write about something that could have been said in one, and even with that always forgets to make the characters credible, real, and with any interest.
The 2nd part of the book (by then I was already reading it sideways...) it's better, it moves faster and it when something really starts to happen, but it's a bit too late to change the overall feeling.
This book took 9 years to write. Was it because there are so much unnecessary words in it, or because he didn't know what to write? Overwritten and not worth the waiting... I'm glad I ended it.
The only real good thing? Probably the ending. Short and bye bye.