The Virgin Suicides
Ratings289
Average rating3.8
i'm not rating this because i only read one chapter, but there were so many things i did not like about this book already:
- the boys putting the lisbon sisters on a pedestal from a distance, meeting them properly, then deciding they weren't as pretty as they thought they were
- the blatant misogyny from almost every male character - boys sneaking into the girl's house, attributing a suicide attempt for jealousy over a BOY (which was pure speculation), even their father saying how dramatic they all were on their periods eye roll
- RACISM. direct quotes “he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look” and “he came murmuring with his oversize jaw and loose lips, his tiny Japanese eyes...“
- ableism - the r-slur and m-slur are both used to describe a boy with down syndrome
in this book's defense, it was written in 1993 so there was a different standard of what was politically correct at the time. it makes me happy that in the 2020's we strive to read books from the aforementioned people groups that were the butt of the joke in older literature. this being said, i don't really feel like using my leisure time to continue reading a book that uses language i morally don't agree with.
Soughted out after watching the movie that equally captured a brilliant narrative voice and interesting rich story. Really really good, engaging and tragic. Really delves into the perspectives of the young boys viewing the Lisbons and the oppressive forces they face. Amazing
2.5
It had potential, but in the end, I couldn't stand the book and its content anymore. It was very intriguing at first but I grew bored from the narrator's perspective after the first chapter.
3.5. I think I'm biased because I loved the movie when I was a teenager. (yikes)
I liked the vibes but i wish the narrators weren't the little weirdo neighborhood pervs. I don't mind that aspect of the story itself because it really paints the picture of how “elusive” the girls seem to be, but I definitely would've preferred an omniscient narrator.
anyways, rip to the Lisbon sisters y'all would've loved Lana Del Rey.
can't stand the writing and it was tough to finish. I just know if this book was written in a style i liked, i wouldve loved it
La mejor manera de despedir mis años adolescentes. Prosa que te hace querer cerrar el libro y saltar de emoción, ver el mundo por los ojos de chavos idiotas como si fuera la primera vez. Quiero leer este libro cuando sea un hombre viejo.
time to watch the movie cause i'm so sad i finished it and wish i didnttttttt it was v good but like let's get a perspective of the girls !!
I loved how it was told from the male gaze. It meant that the story was haunting and we know very little about the Lisbon sisters.
Rating: 3.1 leaves out of 5Characters: 2.75/5 Cover: 2/5Story: 2.75/5Writing: 4.75/5Genre: Classic/Contemp/LitFicType: AudiobookWorth?: MehHated Disliked Meh It Was Okay Liked LovedBoy oh boy I had an itch to read this. Something came up and I wanted to watch the movie once again, hadn't in YEARS, but then decided to read the book first. I had never done so before so I was eager to get into it. What I like about the book is how they make it feel whimsical in a way. Kind of like you are on a high and want to spin around with the fairies. It was very much like a modern retelling of a Shakespeare play. I also like when the story finally got around to the sisters. The whole book could have been a bit shorter if the author did spend time on a lot of nonsense. I know it was being told from one of the guys POV and all of that but like... it dragged. But it was poetic in a way. Though... maybe not from... a teenage boy POV.I get parenting is hard, but if you are so far stuck up your ass where you can't see where you are hurting your kids... well YOU are a problem. Did I like the movie or book better? Eeehh I think I like them in their own way. The movie was straight to the point more so than the book.Also Trip is a dick. A good punch to the throat could make me feel a bit better.
What could I even say about this book that hasn't already been said before. The writing is gorgeous and the story moves along at a solid pace. The only problem I had with it was the last chapter just felt really slow. This book in many areas was descriptive to a point where i felt as if i were in the house with the girls, feeling the same pain, aching, and longing that they did. This could all be because I watched the movie before I read the book but either way this book was so amazing. It is just so captivating to think of yourself as one of the boys watching the girls they idolized in a sense one by one. There were so many parts I underlined as I read it and so many moments where i just had to put the book down and try not to cry. Solid 5 stars. Jeffery writing this thru the view of the boys in the town and using non singular pronouns to describe the narrator is genius. That is what drew me in and made me feel connected because it was as if I was one of the boys watching all of this happen. The ending was cruel, . I could write what feels like an entire essay on this book and the symbolism of the girls, trees, graveyard, and the take of how suicide effects not only the family but a community, how girls are seen thru the eyes of others at a teenage state, and the suicides themselves and how they all relate. There is so much jammed into a book of roughly 250 pages and I've never had a book effect or hit me like this.
I ... have no idea how I feel about this one. Oddly detached? Sometimes Eugenides got in his own way and the flowery writing dragged me out of the story? I'm glad I'll get to discuss it with my book club.
i don't really have the words to describe how i feel about this book right now but what i think is that it was very smart. i really liked it!!
The teenaged male gaze is essentially what you'd expect, but Eugenides makes it pretty: “We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
i saw reviews that complained about the lack of “deeper meaning” to this book, and i'm a bit confused because the meaning isn't that deep but poignant nonetheless. i think this book could spark important conversation amongst those of us who are well enough to discuss mental health and help those in need. but it's... really not that (much) deep(er).
this book is a story of what happens from an amalgamation of 1) parental emotional and mental abuse 2) poor mental health and mental health stigmas 3) and apathetic fanatacism. these girls were stifled by their parents and then kept at arm's length by the society around them, and y'all are looking for “deeper meaning” than that? uh uh. nope.
i'm especially not about romanticising suicide, so if you're trying to look deeper in that sense, don't @ me. this story is tragic and heartbreaking and a warning signal for those of us still making fun of teenage girls for the littlest things.
My only negative experience with this book was the many references to their bodies as if it really mattered (especially since the narrators seem to be grown men with wives recalling the body of a teenage girl), and what really made me laugh was how a vagina was described as a beast with fur and “otter insulation”. It didn't ruin the story, but it lingered in my head even when watching the movie. But I know this infatuation is purposeful. It's kind of the whole point. Besides that, I truly loved this.
some of my favorite quotes (probably everyone else's too, I'm not very original):
“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.”
“if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers' feet and hands are doing.”
“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time”
What a book. Wow. This book was beautifully and exquisitely written. Eugenides has a real talent for writing some incredible sentences and passages that have stayed with me long after finishing the story. This book is a story that is fundamentally deeply disturbing and morbid and I rather guiltily devoured it. It was intense and left me fascinated and enamoured by it. The Lisbon girls have an enrapturing quality that left me transfixed and obsessed with them just like the boys within the plot. I felt the story was so intriguing that it's still stayed with me. This book beautifully and painfully exposes familial suicide in 1970s Michigan. It's a phenomenal story that I simply adored.
4.5
Let me tell you something before I review this book. Before I went on to read this, I've already seen the movie once, when I was a child, and I got the chance to re-watch it again around September this year. I instantly fell in love with the film adaptation, and a few days later, I found myself downloading an e-book version of it. I started reading The Virgin Suicides around September, as well, and I finally decided to finish it as of today (12:38 A.M. December 16, 2015).
One thing I love about the film is that it remained faithful to this book, which is a rare scenario in book-to-movie adaptations. You'd be pleased to know that Sofia Coppola (who's one of my favorite directors, btw) and her team did a terrific job on putting it on film.
Now onto the book. It's such a quick read. But to be honest, I couldn't find myself to love the book. It was dark and depressing and I felt very sorry for the Lisbon sisters' parents. I can't ever imagine 5 of their children, let alone 1 child, commit suicide all at the same time. It's very gut-wrenching! I tried reflecting on it, afterwards. As parents of the sisters, how do you move on and go after that event?
I love Eugenides' writing style. The book was well-written, the story line was cohesive and the narration from the boys made the characters come to life. The use of third-person plural was ingenious, although I would have expected more character development. The ending was not conclusive either. Since it is told in an outside perspective, the answers to many of the questions remained unanswered, only assumed.
But overall, I was impressed by this novel and the movie alike. I highly recommend this to everyone, but prepare yourself for a lot of feels.
Okay, put this one down under the “don't let teen girls read this”–no unfounded aspersion on girls, just personal experience. First read: wow, how romantic and beautiful, in the midst of life we are in death, am I right, the suburbs sure are evocative. Interim: wow, death and teenage girls get romanticized a lot, that's really concerning, this book celebrates that, not cool, the male gaze sure is dangerous. Second read: OH THAT'S THE POINT, DUH, also the suburbs are still really evocative.
Because it's Jeffrey Eugenides, I want to give this book five stars. Of all living contemporary authors I've read, Eugenides is my favorite. I'm sure it won't be long before I come across another writer who impresses me more—there are so many to discover—but for the time being, Eugenides is the man. Middlesex was fun, heartbreaking, and surprisingly wonderful. The Marriage Plot an under-appreciated character-driven novel.
And yet, I want to give The Virgin Suicides three stars because, in truth, I didn't care that much for it. I found the unified narrative voice to be grating; it was one I never felt like I could identify with. The narrative structure, largely a summation of all the events that took place so long ago, didn't work for me. This is perhaps my own issue, my own personal distaste, as I had the same qualm with Diaz's [b:The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao|297673|The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao|Junot Díaz|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1275611938s/297673.jpg|3281466], a novel that implemented a nearly identical style. (The primary difference between the two is that Oscar Wao's narrator was given a name and supporting role while Virgin Suicide's narrator remains a vague member of the collective). The whole “and so and so did so and so, then so and so did such and such” fails to grab my attention. I find that voice lacking in so many ways, especially when that voice has no personality of its own. And when that voice tells me about how this family rakes their leaves this way, this family raked their leaves that way, and that family rake their leaves this way, well...
But, because it was Eugenides' first and because it wasn't so much that the writing was bad as it was that it didn't resonate with me, I'm settling for four stars. There's some great writing in here and the story—what little bit of it is really in here—is good.
It just goes to show how much perspective plays in a part in ratings. Had I never read any of Eugenides' other works, I would've given this three stars at best and probably not returned to him for quite some time. Since I've read and loved both Middlesex and The Marriage Plot, however, I give the book an extra star and eagerly await Eugenides' next. Sometimes the rating system can never do justice.
I just finished reading this book and have to say that I was bothered by it. I saw the movie quite some time ago and was bothered by it as well, and thought that maybe by reading the book I would gain a little more insight. Well, I guess in some ways I did gain a little insight.
The book is about the 5 Lisbon sisters: Lux, Mary, Therese, Bonnie and Cecilia, one of whom commits suicide fairly early in the book (Cecilia), and then aftermath from her suicide which leads to the suicides of the remaining sisters. The story is told from the point of view of the teenage boys who observed the sisters over the course of the year between the first suicide and the last, and all of the “evidence” they gathered which they were hoping would help explain to them why these girls did what they did. These boys (who are grown men as narrators) were just as bewildered as I was after reading this. The 4 remaining sisters are made into prisoners in their home, which can drive any teenager to do rash things (like runaway for one), but not these girls. They were prisoners of parents who thought by protecting them from the world, they would not have the same fate of the first suicidal sister.
Jeffrey Eugenides has written an interesting book. I enjoyed his book “Middlesex” and found that this book had a lot of the same issues of angst and acceptance that the character in “Middlesex” had to deal with. That's where the similarities end. Eugenides has written a book that discusses teen suicide which is always a shocking event when it occurs, and it leaves all of us wondering “why?”, “what was so wrong that they chose this way to deal with their problems?”. That's exactly what the narrators in this book are asking themselves, even with all of the knowledge they had of the girls and the neighborhood at the time, these men still (after all the years that had passed) ask themselves “why did the Lisbon girls do this?”. The reader is also left with that question gnawing away at the end of the book. I have no idea, given everything that is laid out in the book from the POV of these men, why these girls felt this was the way out from under their overly protective and domineering parents. The parents were only trying to protect them, and that protection made them feel like prisoners who felt there was only one way to escape. I think that's what bothered me most, that these girls thought there was no other way out from under their parents and therefore, they had no other choice.
