Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

5-Alpha-Reductase: when I tried to pronounce it by heart to Baby friend, who is studying genetics, she brightened and said “oh, yeah, I know that!”, and pronounced it for me, explaining exactly how it works. The story of Middlesex is about this gene, but not really: it is the story of the whole family beyond and before the birth of the narrator, who hides in the development of love and life as his great-grandparents move from Greece to America, united in a marriage that should not have taken place because they were brother and sister, thus opening the way to the whole story; the story is beautiful, believe me:it’s witty and funny and it makes you laugh and cry. Since it begins in Greece in 1922, and then it moves to Detroit, and finally to California, there are many things moving between the single story of this couple, what with Prohibition and strange religious leaders, old habits and new currents, freaks and conventional people, and as the world changes, so does the life of the characters, until we get to Germany, and our narrator is an adult ready to be born again.
There are sweet characters to mention, especially the narrator’s grandmother, who made me cry so much, but I won’t say why or when: if you get to that point of the story when tears are flowing down independently, then you will know what I mean. There are also some moments that remain in my memory, like the (somewhat cheesy, but what can I do?) clarinet songs played on Desdemona’s body; a death; a riot; and the journey to California and what came with that.
It is definitely worth reading: sometimes it looks like John Irving (whose work I love) for this twisted, mingled, long accounts that don’t let you sleep, because you just want to see what will happen next.

As I’m writing, I have made no research on the author, so I only know that he lives in Germany and that Middlesex won him the Pulitzer prize in 2003. There will be an update when I have the time to investigate, also because his biography on the books doesn’t talk of any other work of his apart from these two.