4 of 4 members found this review helpful.
“The Virgin Suicides, I've come to realize, is the closest thing to 'literary ecstasy' that we're likely to come in contact with any time soon.
Eugenides captures something with this novel that can't be easily distilled or reproduced (even his later effort, Middlesex, fell short)--the lines read like long-winded passages of insight. I've done my fair share of reading and dissecting of novels but rarely do I find anything else like this; one of the few books I find myself reading about once every couple of years (Catcher in the Rye, The Rules of Attraction, The Time-Traveler's Wife), this is the most poignant of even that select few.
Centered around an amorous 'we', which is never defined, we witness the beauty of the Lisbon Sisters and their slow and marked decay into self-inflicted death. The love that the 'we' feels for them (and the ongoing notation of their many splendors) exists almost on a whole different layer than what is written—rather than being told what the 'we' of the novel are feeling, we actually feel it.
Prose this perfectly written is a rare treat; what we glean from the prose is almost unheard of—there's a sort of continuous epiphany presented by the book but, of course, it exists outside of our vision; we feel it at work, we understand its weight, but we never quite see it in whole—we're left wondering, much like the group of narrators, what happened. We're left mourning both the loss of the sisters and the glory they have come to represent.
Wonderful, innovative, and unlike any other piece of fiction ever written.”
ColinMoon wrote this review Thursday, March 27 2008.
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