by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Product Description
This beautiful and sad first novel, recently adapted for a major motion picture, tells of a band of teenage sleuths who piece together the story of a twenty-year old family tragedy begun by the youngest daughter's spectacular demise by self-defenstration, which inaugurates 'the year of the suicides.'
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Honestly!, 2008-08-22
When the doctor treats Cecilia Lisbon's slit wrists, he asks why in the world she would want to kill herself?
"Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl," Cecilia replies.
Cecilia should have read >Huckleberry Finn< by Mark Twain. Huck had to dress up like a thirteen-year-old girl, and would understand her plight. Huck had also seen a drawing by fifteen-year-old Emmeline Grangerford, who pictured herself dressed in a white gown, poised to leap to her death from a bridge. Emmeline had done another drawing, "I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup Again, Alas!" of a dead bird.
"I didn't somehow seem to take to them," Huck said reluctantly about her pictures. He was on the lam with a runaway slave at the time, living hand-to-mouth, so Emmeline's obsession with death and sadness was hard for him to comprehend.
In the final chapter of >The Virgin Suicides<, the author Eugenides explains, "In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws."
Rudolf Rolfs' satirical German poem "Der Backfisch" also expresses angst about the "flaws:"
"I would like to despair of the whole world!
"I would like to be banished from my own home!
"I would like to throw myself in front of a car!
"But I only saw these things in a movie."
The best that can be said for >The Virgin Suicides< is that it works as a piece of browbeating exploitation-literature. Literature is after all the same as movies; it's only commerce.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Jorie's Reads on The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides , 2008-08-18
The Virgin Suicides
* 1001 Books Book
Eugenides, J. (1994). The virgin suicides. New York: Warner Books.
Thanks to Oprah, I read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides this past summer. Amazed by Eugenides, I looked to see when the movie would be coming. Well, that has not happened yet for Middlesex but there was Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, a movie adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides' first novel by the same name. Quickly, I put my name on the waiting list for the movie. After I saw the movie, I requested the book. Both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are among the 1001 Books of 2006. Now, I even own a copy of The Virgin Suicides.
Narrated by a group of middle-aged men looking upon items and memories, The Virgin Suicides takes the reader through that fateful "year of the suicides." These guys were the teenage neighbors of the Catholic Lisbon family. Mr. Lisbon teaches high school math while the strict Mrs. Lisbon makes a home for her five lovely daughters. They are the "brainy Therese (17), fastidious Mary (16), ascetic Bonnie (15), libertine Lux (14), and pale, saintly Cecilia (13)," (Eugenides).
Cecilia attempts suicide and seemingly stuns all, including her older sisters. In order to cheer the glum Cecilia, the Lisbons throw a party in their basement. Cecilia excuses herself and jumps from her bedroom window, successfully taking her own life. Becoming the talk of the Grosse Pointe community, the remaining Lisbon girls grow more isolated from other kids and the grist for the rumor mill.
Again, Eugenides impressed and held me spellbound by his writing. I found myself wishing that Eugenides, not King, had written Carrie. The seamless movement of his group of narrators through interviews and attempts of understanding what has come to pass in neighborhood would have smoothed the multitude of wrinkles in Carrie. I wish my high school group projects/papers had gone so well!
Eugenides captures the dementia of obsession and elusiveness of crushes with painful poignancy. In their telling of the Lisbon girls, these guys have beautified these sisters, particularly the dazzling Lux. Memory and aura protect these girls from the scrutiny attempted by the quixotic group of men. They are still haunted by the Lisbons.
Allegorical or not, I was enthralled by the descriptions and views of the Lisbon girls. Due to rubber necking and disbelief, I could not stop reading this book. In their endeavor to solve the mystery, I learned much about the narrator. Coming away from my reading, I felt I knew much more about the telescope than the stars. Of course, people tend to tell on themselves. This is how life goes.
I give The Virgin Suicides Four and Three quarters Pearls.
For more book reviews by Jorie, go to http://JoriesReads.Wordpress.Com
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Time in a Bottle, 2008-07-27
"... they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived -- bound, in other words, for life."
The Virgin Suicides is not just a story of the loneliness of being female. It is also a story of the loneliness of life and understanding what it is to be female; the pressures, or rather, the facade of traditional values placed upon women, lead to the Lisbon sisters demise.
What makes The Virgin Suicides so compelling is the fact that it is told from the male persepctive. And, from a time, the 70's, where everyone blamed changing moraks and godlessness for the troubles with youth. This brilliant novel serves as an allegory to life. In the process of protecting our youth, or by following traditions that never truly exsisted, we cause unhappiness larger and darker than death itself.
The Virgin Suicides is a darkly comic, deeply moving novel. The ending will gnaw at your stomach. The complacency, the indifference of the world, will truly astonish. It transcends time in a mythical way, and will leave an ominous mark upon your life. Pure genius.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
this is a true story, 2008-07-18
this is one of the saddest and truest stories I have ever read. I am so grateful to Jeffery Eugenides for telling this story of young teenage girls who choose suicide because in the end it is the one true thing that they can actually do--the one true communication that everyone "gets." Why is it so hard for the boys (the narrators) to hear the girls? Or for anyone in the novel to hear the girls? they are completely alone, not because they think of no one else or are selfish, but because there is no avenue of expression open to them; if everyone else in the novel would stop putting the girls under continual surveillance maybe they would have heard the girls, but it is hard to say for sure... to me, I see the novel really as a true representation of a period in our history and of young teenage women--at least how they appear. Someone will have to write the same novel from the girls' point of view....i found the novel heartbreaking and truly reminiscent.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Unusual narrators, exaggerated concept, and intelligent storytelling make this readable & thought-provoking. Highly recommended, 2008-06-06
In American suburbia, the five Lisbon sisters, ages 12 through 17, commit suicide. The youngest goes first, and after their parents sequester the family within the house, her sisters follow a year afterward. Their story is told by a group neighborhood of boys, now men, who in their fanatic obsession with the Lisbon sister have pieced together the events leading up to--and possibly causing--the suicides. The unusual narrative voice is at once distant and invasively familiar, and paints a surreal image of familiar, ordinary teenage life twisted by stifling overcrowding and overprotection. The narrators never quite determine why the girls commit suicide, but this unanswered question opens up a world of thought for the reader. At pieces sweet and claustrophobic, humorous and unsettling, The Virgin Suicides is strangely engrossing and stands in a class of its own: a unusual novel that investigates without judgment. I highly recommend it.
The novel opens with the suicide of the last Lisbon daughter, and only after revealing the ending does it go back to the beginning and explore the journey through each of the five suicides. The narrators, now-grown neighbors of the sisters, speak across the distance of time and a suburban street. They've pieced their story together through memories, interviews, and mementos collected from the Lisbon house. Needless to say, The Virgin Suicides is an unusual novel from the onset, but these unusual aspects are all strengths. The uncommon first person plural of narrators, which stand at a distance even as they watch the sisters in the privacy of their joint bathroom, captures the reader from the onset, moving swiftly through the plot yet pausing for intimate detail that brings the characters (the sisters, their parents, and even the narrators) to life. It creates a surreal and almost haunting atmosphere which maintains a sense of mystery despite the blunt introduction of the suicides. The intriguing journey back to the suicide which open the text keeps the book interesting to the last page. As such, the novel's ingenious storytelling makes it hard to put down.
The text is swiftly readable but never disintegrates into a cheap thrill; instead, it is an intelligent, thoughtful book. The suicides are both hook and climax to the story, but the book itself is a journey to and between the suicides. There are a dozen possibilities, but neither the narrators nor the author ever pinpoint what drives Celia, Therese, Mary, Bonnie, and Lux to kill themselves. At some level, this unanswered question is frustrating and makes the end of the book almost teasingly brief. However, the cause of the suicides is essential--and yet somehow irrelevant. What matters is the Lisbon sisters: their life as fractioned representations of modern suburban adolescence, smothered under the protective care of their parents, left forever unfinished by their suicides. The Virgin Suicides is exploration without judgment, opening a world to the reader for him to think on it himself.
I'm was not sure what to expect when I first picked up this book. I was aware of its success and intrigued by the unusual concept, but wasn't quite sure how the latter could lead to the former. Now, having read it, I'm impressed by the connection: Eugenides writes an extreme scenario into the most mundane setting, and so by exaggerating reality he in fact explores it. The sisters are real personalities and also archetypes, images of adolescence which is constrained even as it begins to blossom. The Virgin Suicides is quite brilliant, haunting, readable, intelligent, and thought-provoking. I'm impressed, and glad I had to the chance to read it. I highly recommend this book.
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