The Virgin Suicides in Around the Year in 52 Books

Jun 28, 2021 Book Concierge rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: library, concierge, coming-of-age, mental-illness, sisters, family, debut, michigan

3.5***

Eugenides’ debut work focuses on one family in a Detroit suburb. The five Lisbon sisters chafe against their mother’s strict rules and attract the attention of the neighborbood boys. Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary and Therese are beautiful and eccentric, and off limits. And then one commits suicide, and the four remaining sisters struggle to find their way out of grief – both their own and their parents’.

The novel is narrated by a group of thirty-something men, looking back on their own earl ...more

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Dec 13, 2009 Nathalie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: from-1001-list-i-have-read, crème-de-la-crème, own, read-more-than-a-decade-ago

Interesting.
Getting under your skin in no time.
Frivolous and yet painstakingly serious.

These are just a few ways to describe the novel I'm about to tell you about.

This isn't the first I've read of Jeffrey Eugenides and what I've read so far has all been terrific. Middlesex is a tragic comedy in its own way and reads like a train, a book that stays with you longer than you anticipated.

The Virgin Suicides is of the same matter. The subject is darker and more final that the theme of Middlesex, but Interesting.
Getting under your skin in no time.
Frivolous and yet painstakingly serious.

These are just a few ways to describe the novel I'm about to tell you about.

This isn't the first I've read of Jeffrey Eugenides and what I've read so far has all been terrific. Middlesex is a tragic comedy in its own way and reads like a train, a book that stays with you longer than you anticipated.

The Virgin Suicides is of the same matter. The subject is darker and more final that the theme of Middlesex, but the subject is treated with such honesty, dropping the melodramatic veil most novels tend to have when dealing with suicides.

You follow the lives of five girls, generally called the Lisbon girls, through the eyes of the boys in their neighborhood. They rarely get into contact with the girls, so we get a very subjective and distant view of the girls' lives and what got into their minds when they set the events in motion.
Hence the title, which is a dead giveaway of what is happening in the book, the book doesn't pretend to have a plot that twists and turns as you read through. Instead you are reading a very emotional account of how some boys turned men feel as they reminisce about these events and try to understand why the Lisbon girls killed themselves. The answer is almost as elusive as the girls themselves.

In the wake of what they are planning, adults are in the story but treated with the lack of sympathy as youngsters dare to have for their elders. As if the girls were the definition of honesty and innocence and the parents were to blame for smothering them. As black and white their opinions are, they still cling to their angelic views of the girls up until the last page of the book.

On the cover this book is compared to The Catcher in the Rye but I can't agree with this. The Catcher is a novel read by almost everyone during high school, compulsary as it is, but I wouldn't feel comfortable with this book being read by teenagers with their emotions running high. The subject is touchy, even though it acts like a coming of age for the narrators, the girls rather chose to stay young forever by ending their lives before they could grow up and they could get acclimated with their new set of ideas.

But it's definitely something that needs to be read by as much people as possible because novels like this don't come around that often.

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Apr 07, 2021 Barbara rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The prose in this novel is arresting; the story uncomfortable in so many ways; the symbolism well-placed; and the point of view fresh. The Virgin Suicides unfolds from a first-person plural viewpoint: a group of men collectively recalling the incidents that occurred in their upper middle class Detroit suburb during their teenage years, and against which they continued to measure experiences later in life. It is less a story about the suicides themselves and more about the boys’ adolescent fantas ...more

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Feb 20, 2009 Viktoriya rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read

I decided to read this book after I read and absolutely loved "Middlesex". Once again I wasn't sure I will be able to handle this subject matter. And once again, Eugenides did simply GREAT! ...more

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