-
1 of 1 members found this review helpful.Just a Fine Turn of Cherry-tinged Writing
“Granted I had heard of Jerry Eugenides pulitizer prize winning novel Middlesex and Sofia Coppola's movie The Virgin Suicides but never really gave it much thought to sit down and read one of Eugenides' books. Upon shopping for fiction-lover brother this past August, I did some Amazonian research and came up with a list of ten or so titles I thought would fit him and his literary tastes. Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," made it to the top of the list. So I did the easy thing and ordered it from Amazon and just before wrapping it I took a closer look at the subject matter...hmmm 5 or 6 sisters all kill themselves and that's pretty much the plot of the book...and had second thoughts about unleashing this black macabre upon said brother. Thus, a second gift purchasing of The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics) became the substitute stand-in as I kept "The Virgin Suicides," to read and screen first before unleashing such dark subject matter on another.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-22.
And on a selfish note, boy, I'm glad I kept it. Good creative writing where sentences are crafted well and language is used uniquely and the narrative is skilled to weave a story wins me over every time, despite subject matter. From a person who has read a few books in his days, Eugenides won me over on the first page. "They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, 'This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go.' He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began." That's a sentence. In fact its two sentences. In it, along with the book's first sentence, we get pre-announced that this book is going to be about a group of teenage sisters that end up killing themselves and thirteen months time elapsed it will take for the story to unravel. Many authors would think that's putting too much out there in the beginning revealing the big reveal on page 1. It works wonderfully for Eugenides' tale though.
The story is told through a Greek Chorus narrator of a group of nosy pubescent boys who investigate and obsess over the Lisbon sisters to no end. And just like the classic tragedy, this story harkens back to a Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. We don't blink twice about our teenagers being exposed to Romeo and Juliet's star-crossed love affair ending in suicide and murder but the subject matter of Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," can be daunting and vexing. The novel is loosely based on a real life event of which I'm not too sure about the details so these kind of things evidently happen. Eugenides just turns it into a moral tale about the ultimate selfishness of such acts and while doing so spins a yarn so perfectly catching the awkwardness and thrill that comes along with growing up in America that you become a believer that this isn't just a black comedy but a tale that reveals something true of the human soul and psyche...an aim for all good literature.
So there is a pinnacle moment in the book of which I won't tell of as to not give anything away should you read it. I read a lot of Stephen King books as a kid growing up and though "The Virgin Suicides," isn't a horror book, this piece of writing in a few paragraphs achieves a chill in the bones as much as a novel full of King's Pet Cemetaries or haunted Colorado hotels do. Just listen to this writing, "How long we stayed like that, communing with her departed spirit, we can't remember. Long enough for our collective breath to start a breeze slowly through the room that made Bonnie..." And that's all I'll reveal. The rest you just gotta read for yourself, dear readers.
I'll hand off this book pre-screened to the brother now, with a caveat, I want it back to read again someday. Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," highly recommended but not for the faint of heart. --mmw” -
2 of 4 members found this review helpful.
cheating
“It puzzled me somewhat that, though this book was highly regarded on Amazon, I had never heard of it. So I put it on my wish list but never got around to buying it. Then a movie came out, so I figured I'd better get a move on before others were more informed than I!
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-08-04.
So even though I'd been wanting to read this for years, when I finally did I couldn't figure out what all the fuss was about.
It's a novel about five sisters who grow up in a fastidious Catholic household and all kill themselves within a short span of time. Unusually for a modern novel, the story is narrated by a chorus in the classical Greek style, a chorus consisting of a passel of teenage boys who were variously in love with the doomed sisters.
But I don't think that the author, Jeffrey Eugenides, has any more insight about such matters than anybody else does. The use of the teenage boys as a narrative strategy struck me as awkward, pretentious, and unnecessary. Worse, I didn't think it added much to whatever the book was supposed to be getting at. I suspect if Eugenides had used a more straightforward narrative device, the clunky improbability of his tale would have been laid bare.
In other words, if he had told his story in a more conventional manner, it would have become blazingly obvious how little he has brought to the table. Essentially we are presented with the mystery of five tragic and inexplicable suicides--but there's never any explication. It's not like they were unfathomable, but then, when the skillful novelist leads you to consider things aright, you can see why they happened or what can be learned from them.
No, no. Nothing like that. I don't think anybody in the book - least of all the author - had any idea why the suicides occurred, other than a gaseous "Mom was oppressive." "The Virgin Suicides" is like one of those modern poems you can never understand because the author was writing to himself, not you.
Initially I withheld judgment on the mistaken belief that Eugenides' book was a novelization of something that had actually happened back east, but a cursory investigation into the matter disabused me of that. Eugenides spun the tale up out of whole cloth.
But that's cheating, you see. You can't make a mystery in your book, not solve it, and then declare that the very insolubility of your mystery reveals how ineffably mysterious everything is! Great art is made when a human mind communciates insight about some mystery in life, not merely repeats it and asks you to draw your own conclusions.
Otherwise, who can't write a great book? Here's what you do: 1) set up a familiar milieu; 2) have something horrible or shocking happen; 3) have people spend the rest of the book wondering why it happened; 4) narrate everything in an artsy, literary way.
Presto. You've got yourself a bestseller.” -
0 of 1 members found this review helpful.
THE best book ever written. Period.
“This is my single most favorite book of all time. It is beautifully written. Eugenides' style is unmatched by anyone. I could almost not care less about the plot, but his writing style is so.... I can't even describe it! But as for the plot, it is a strange and intriguing story that I have read over and over and over again. The movie pales in comparison, although the story is basically the same. Read the book, and you will see the world in a different light.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-08-02. -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
Beautiful enough, lacks punch
“The Virgin Suicides employs a narration technique unlike many books, but that might be both an advantage and a disadvantage in the end. It tells the haunting tale of four sisters, haunted and torn by the suicide of their youngest sister, Cecilia. Narrated by an anonymous group of infatuated teenage boys, the novel tells of the disastourous year that followed, "The Year of The Suicides."
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-07-01.
The detached viewpoint inhibits the reader to, theoretically, see the entire situation from beginning to end through the lens of something other than just an omnicesent narrator. I get it. But the problem is that, at the end, the punch that should be there is gone. There is no real sympathy or empathy felt for these girls no matter how many beautiful sentences are written. Eugenides is obviously gifted, but the lack of true emotional hardness and pathos is too much to get over. Once finished, there isn't any real movement for these characters or their loss. It just is, and the events of the novel just happened. The detachment is both a blessing and a curse, I just can't recommend what it is more of.” -
Beautifully written, haunting tale...
“I saw this movie back in October and I didn't care for it, so I moved this book up my reading list... I'm still disturbed by the entire story and I wish we had found out a little more of the "why", but I guess that would have made it unrealistic to me, huh? I mean, do we ever know WHY someone kills themselves? Especially if we are on the outside looking in, which is what the narrators are - just school friends of the girls.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-06-29.
I will say this - the book is absolutely beautifully written. The narrative seems to pick you up and spirit you away to the neighborhood. You can see, almost feel the Lisbon girls and their home.
I won't say that I loved it - having just finished it, I'm still digesting it I suppose. But it was a great read, so well... VERY well written... definitely worth a read!”
