Customer Reviews

Virgin Suicides

5 star:		(228)
4 star:		(107)
3 star:		(45)
2 star:		(34)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

Wow. What a fabulous, page-turning, fascinating book! It's been two years since I saw the movie, but from what I can remember, the movie doesn't do this book justice. Maybe it is the unique style of the narrative that made me love it so, or the sweet obsession of the narrators...I don't know what exactly, but The Virgin Suicides was simply wonderful despite the morbid subject.

Set in 1970s suburbia, The Virgin Suicides tells the story of the Lisbon family from the point of view of a group of boys living in the same neighborhood. Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon are both sort of boring and normal, but their five daughters, Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux and Cecilia are exotic and mysterious...so different from their parents, it's hard to imagine how it happened. The story opens with the suicide of Mary, the last in the "year of the suicides" of the five sisters. From there, the story starts at the beginning as seen through the eyes of the neighborhood boys and is compiled through heresay, interviews, diary entries, personal contact, and their avid spying. What is so unique about this story is since it is told from an outside perspective, the answers to many questions remain unanswered, only assumed.

The Virgin Suicides takes readers through a year in the life of the Lisbon sisters, their untimely demise, the speculations of the neighborhood, as well as the unraveling of the Lisbon family. A tender, lively story with the ending already known, but fascinating to see how it gets there. I was impressed over and over and highly recommend this profound, moving novel.

The Virgin Suicides would seem to be just another tragic tale of American suburbia, but Eugenides transforms it into a unique masterpiece. For starters, the story of the five Lisbon suicides is told from the perspective of an adolescent boy who, along with his friends, is obsessed with the mysterious Lisbon sisters. This gives the book an interesting, and often humorous, perspective on growing up, but only adds to the mystery surrounding the Lisbon house, as the boys have little real information to relate to the reader. One sees the Lisbon house as a depressing place to live, but can never really know its inhabitants. Cecilia's suicide attempt starts the book, but one can never understand why everything surrounding the event is so nonchalant, as though it were a preordained event. Similarly, one never really gets to know the surviving Lisbon sisters; they are all one mold, differentiated by a few images presented in various chapters. With any other author, this lack of character development would be profoundly frustrating, but Eugenides makes it work. One comes to share the obsession the neighborhood boys have for the Lisbon sisters, and the obsession, combined with the mystery surrounding the girls, makes it difficult to put the book down. Eugenides is a brilliant writer, the book is almost flawless, and, at just under 250 pages, it can be read in a sitting. I cannot recommend this title enough.

If you read the "virgin suicides" expecting answers, explanations, or any kind of analysis on how 5 teenage sisters ended up commiting suicide, one after the other...you'll be disappointed. After you reach the last of the 250 very well written pages,you realise that Jeffrey Eugenides hasn't revealed anything more than you knew from page one: the only thing the reader knows is that the 5 blond, almost indistinguishable Lisbon sisters commit suicide one by one.

The story is told through the eyes and ears of the neighbourhood boys. Teenage boys who are obssessed with the Lisbon sisters and watch their lives and deaths (or what they know of their lives and deaths) step by step. So, in the end, all we get to know about this tragic story, is through these teenage boys' eyes. It's like we are watching the chorus in an ancient greek tragedy: the chorus watches from afar, feels sorrow and pain, but doesn't know or reveal much.

This fact of not knowing, of not understanding the whys and the hows of the story, adds an almost surreal quality to the book. Eugenides is a very gifted new author, and manages to create a great book, even though with the total absence of characterization (the 5 sisters are almost described as one single person)as well as the total absence of feeling or explanation, this could prove to be tricky. But he does it skillfully and in the end, this fact of not knowing adds to the book.

A very sad, mysterious, deeply moving novel, a novel where the reader has to read between the lines to feel and understand. My only complaint was the short length of the book, but all in all: I strongly recommend it

From the very title to the opening words of Jeffrey Eugenides' atmospheric novel, you the reader know what you are in for. There is no surprise in the outcome of the book -- and that's the beauty of it. Eugenides instead concentrates on bringing to life the characters, suburban neighborhood and atmosphere of the Lisbon girls and their lives.

The novel is about both the sisters and the boys who are infatuated with them. On a personal level I could relate having grown up in suburbia just five house down the block from the beautiful Williams sisters. My friends and I would sit outside their house on the curb dying to know what goes on in those rooms.

Eugenides' treatment of the suicides is dark and real. He takes these moments and details them as if they were poetry. Without trying to sound morbid, you seriously will be dying to get to the climax of the novel which takes it's time and occurs with such straighforward description that you can almost hear the ominous music that should accompany the situation.

I'm not a literary scholar and I don't pretend to be; I read and finish about 30 books a year (which I think is a goodly amount) and watch a lot of movies; I work as a copywriter in a big city publishing house and am trying to finish my own novel at the same time; and I have to say that this is the BEST book I have ever read. I've never really felt a book as much as this one.

SPOILERS AHEAD (if it's possible given the title of the book):
I love this book but I wonder if anyone, including the author, entirely understands what he has done here. Does he think the deaths of the Lisbon girls mysterious, or is it only his unreliable narrator who thinks it, a man clearly haunted as much by adolescence itself as by five long-dead girls? If you want this to stay mysterious, stop reading now.

I'm puzzled that anybody is puzzled why the Lisbon sisters all kill themselves. There are clues all through the book: at the prom, one sister asks if the boys took them out because they felt sorry for them. One reportedly cries when she can't afford to get her messed up teeth fixed, something her parents either can't or won't pay for. One says she feels like a charity child, attending this posh school because her father teaches there. They are describe as wearing last year's school clothes because the mother won't buy them any that fit (which really poor families sometimes do at thrift shops--at least then they're the right size). At the prom, they know their "shapeless sacks" dresses are wrong the minute the other girls look at them. Obviously, as much as the boys idealize and romanticize them, the girls feel like freaks and justthisclose to being outcasts--like the retarded boy the kids make fun of at the party right before Cecilia kills herself. If they don't band together and hide their family's dirty laundy, they'll be openly persecuted instead of just whispered about.

Trip dumps Lux not because they had sex, but because she showed emotional vulnerability. "I always screw up," she says--not the stuff the Kewl Girl is supposed to say. The boys don't call after the prom, even though Bonnie's date promises to. They can't trust anyone; no neighbor cares enough to call a Social Worker or truant officer when they're pulled out of school. Aren't they worth rescuing? Apparently not. Why don't they run away? Because their mother has told them all their lives boys only want them for one thing and will lose interest in them. What little experience they have with boys bears this out. They have no reason to believe the outside world will value them when their own parents don't and boys who get to know them even slightly seem to lose interest. They don't fully trust the ones who are crushing on them at the end because they figure they'll just get bored too if the girls don't stay on the pedestal.

Bonnie's date won't call her, but he parts his hair the way she liked it when he's middle-aged--he doesn't want a real girl, he wants a fantasy. When Mary commits suicide a month after her sisters died, it's on the day of another girl's debut party--the kind of party to which she will never be invited, let alone give. She can't escape to college because she wasn't allowed to finish high school. And she figures she must be worthless, because after all that, the hospital sent her back home, just as they sent Cecilia home. They sent her home to a mother who apparently never did laundry or had the girls do it, given the state of the bedlinens when the house is cleaned out. The mother treats them like trash so that's how they feel, isolated in this middle class neighborhood where other people have debutante parties.

We don't know if there was physical abuse, but there is clearly emotional abuse, and it is hard to get authorities to intervene in such cases even now, let alone in those days when you had to show a broken bone or a broken hymen before anyone would do anything. Eugenides has brilliantly depicted the pathetic attempts of psychologists and reports to explain the suicides away with fancy arcane theories about rock music and Rorschachs, when the girls are obviously miserable because they want to fit in and are never allowed to. The naivete of the boys is understandable, and it's sweet and accurate how they would be dazzled by the glamor of the sisters' feminine preening tools: mustache bleach creams and feminine hygiene supplies, when the girls obviously were afraid of being ugly and gross. But the cluelessness of the school, with its Day of Grieving, and the callous indifference of the neighbors--except for the one old Greek lady who deplores the American custom of pretending to be happy, like covering over Cecilia's scars with perky bracelets (what a brilliant image the author has there!)--the fact that "normal" well-adjusted adults allowed this to happen is disgusting. And disgustingly typical of suburbia, with its constant cover-ups. If something goes wrong in a slum, every tenement neighbor knows it. And slum kids know that if they commit a felony, the authorities will pull them out of the parents' house, and it won't be hushed up the way it is with "nice" families. They'll have to do time in a juvenile facility, which may be an improvement over home. Nice girls like the Lisbons don't know how to work the system.

Eugenides has done a magnificent job of telling the readers, if they care to look, everything the sisters didn't know how to tell the world. One of the points of this book is how easy it is for people to ignore the obvious. When we leave the girls mysterious, when we aestheticize them, we are implicated along with the people in the book who aren't interested in them as real people. Many readers have complained the girls are indistinguishable, except for Cecilia and Lux. But I believe the point is that just because we don't know about people, doesn't mean there is nothing to know. Ever read a poem called "Richard Corey"?

We as readers, and the now grown-up boys, can idealize the Lisbons because they are safely dead, and won't interfere with our haunting little fantasies with any of their troubling reality. No wonder the boys prefer these convenient ghosts to their wives.

"We just want to live, if people would let us," says one of the girls.

I first read this book when it came out in 1993 and then reread it for my book group and found that I enjoyed this book just as much on the second go around.

The novel is written in the voice of a nameless adolescent boy - a neighbor who has watched the Lisbon girls grow up and who is fascinated with them even years after they are gone. He speculates about their lives, their loves, their reasons for taking their own lives and yet he has no real answers.

This book focuses on a year in the lives of the Lisbon girls and their families. A dark comedy about adolescent life in the suburbs and the years where girls become women and boys become men The Virgin Suicides is a beautifully written novel with many different undertones - some dark, some sweet and some richly filled with lust, melancholy, and the sweetness that is childhood that the reader feels as though he or she is there behind a dark window peering out across the street and wondering what the girls are thinking about each night as they get ready for bed.

This is a wonderful book about life and it is a shame that the author has not written another book. It is also a shame that this beautifully written story will be translated to film since so much of the beauty is captured in the prose itself - it is very hard to see how this could be translated to the screen so enjoy it before you see the film.

When I found out Sophia Coppola's first film is an adaption of Eugenides' novel, I became curious and read the book. I'm glad I did. It's easy to become rapt in the narrator's recollection of the Lisbon sisters -- the girls who tantalized, tortured, befuddled, frustrated, and awed those around them. A strong sense of place and sensual detail draws the reader in; you virtually join the neighborhood boys and try to make sense of the girls and what becomes of them. This is a unique book, because it evokes Cather, Fitzgerald, and Salinger instead of the hokey Gen-X self-involvement of most '90s American fiction. I'm interested in seeing how Coppola translates the book into film. Read this book, and read Jamison's non-fiction study of youthful tragedy, "Night Falls Fast"; Jamison's examination of suicide, complete with real-life accounts, will augment the sadness -- and eerieness -- of Eugenides' tale.

On the surface, the book seems very simple, an American Beauty-esque tale of how modern suburbia is unfulfilling, combined with a sort of coming of age story. It is a unique story, where we never really understand the main characters, while getting to know very minor characters. The story is artistic without losing it's wicked sense of humor or it's entertainment value.

Author Jeffrey Eugenides provides far more than a simple story, however; he gives us a multi-dimentional tale with strong undercurrents and quiet symbolism. The book is about the sad fate of the Libson girls, certainly, but on the other hand Eugenides uses the girls merely as a focal point for themes (often using strong symbolism and light subtext) about the place of religion and government, about the nature of humans, about, I might even venture to say, the meaning of life. Consider, as you read, the deeper significance of the reoccuring religious icons, the mini-christ figures, the fate of the neighborhood's elms. The Virgin Suicides is as rife with symbolism and metaphor as Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", but unlike Hawthorne, manages to stay very readable. To have such heavy symbolism and not create a pretentious book is a very difficult balance, but Eugenides pulls it off with nothing short of brilliance. The writing is fluid and the prose beautiful. Eugenide turns the most mundane into the most haunting and beautful, with very Earthy black humor and a strong grasp on reality. The book is both dreamy and true to life, a paradox which perhaps is the greatest strength of the book.

Though some may find it's ending somewhat unfulfilling, (for the characters have not really grown from where they started, something that your high shcool english teacher will tell you is imperative for a book) there are libraries full of books that can offer you character growth, and few indeed can offer such appealing prose and such powerful emtotions and ideas as The Virgin Suicides offers. I'm running out of space here, but the bottom line is this: you need to read this book. It's funny, it's tragic, it's powerful, it's true to life. Very few authors can boast a better-crafted first novel. Get the book and find out for yourself.

I must admit that given the title, the cover picture, and the fact that this book was being made into a movie, I had my doubts. I was sure it was going to be some sexual thriller or superficial detective story. I couldn't have been more wrong. This book is a work of art. It is obvious that the author took great time and care with its writing. Each word is carefully selected not just for meaning, but for impact.

Having grown up in a similar neighborhood in the same era, the imagery was particularly effective for me. However, I don't think anyone can read this without getting caught up in the atmosphere. You can feel the summer nights and the cold winter days. You can smell the burning leaves. You can feel what the boys feel as they watch the Lisbon girls from afar. Because,in the end,that is what the book is about-the way we feel, and the memories and images we come away with.

If you appreciate the magic that words can weave, you should read this book.

Define Obsession.

A worryingly-touching novel depicting the struggles of five young girls attempting to grow in the most restrictive of capacities. The story of the suicides is told through the inquisitive eyes of one of the girls many besotted victims. Eugenides' image of obsession and yearning is the feature point of his novel and its jigsaw-like narration allows it to retain a wonderful sense of ambiguity. Eugenides major triumph is his ability to shock. In a novel which reveals its conclusion within the first two lines, it is amazing how it is able to create a false sense of hope from the reader. 'The Virgin Suicides' is beautifully eloquent and Eugenides' vivid imagery makes it a very engaging read. This skill is evident in his superb ability to produce a sense of awkwardness that almost makes the reader feel bad for prying. Even though Eugenides' is dealing with a difficult subject like suicide he still creates a dark and humourous account which actually lightens with every read. 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, which has now been adapted by Sofia Coppola to a feature-length film is coincidentally his first novel as is Sofia Coppola's directorial debut. The film takes a more light-hearted view of the situation whereas the book delivers the story with a more morbid and frightening truth. There are parts however where the novel loses its gripping edge. But it Eugenides is quick to pull it back on track and into the realms of surrealism. 'The Virgin Suicides' is a remarkable novel and Eugenides' melancholic tone throughout makes it so powerful and evocative.