The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

By -
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides


                Cecilia went first. She failed on her first attempt even though she needed over 20 stitches on each wrist. But the second time, Cecilia succeeded in ending her life. Her four older sisters were watched with scrutiny around their neighborhood and their school. Were they mourning? Did they know why Cecilia wanted to kill herself? What could be going through their heads? Lux, Mary, Bonnie and Therese would go a year without their sister before joining her beyond the grave. The entire time they were being watched by the boys who loved them. They tried in vain to reach the Lisbon sisters, to understand them, to express to them the love that boiled over for them. That love would take the boys through to their adulthood, to this book that holds their recollections of the Lisbon sisters. They have been examining the evidence for years trying understand the sisters and their suicides.
                The Virgin Suicides is an intense story with a supremely unsettling tone. Our narrators were young men when the girls took their life. Their narration is filled with unrequited love for the girls and the pain of their losing the Lisbon sisters. There is also an overwhelming sense of mystery surrounding the girls. The reader learns nothing about the girls from the girls themselves. Everything is learned through the observation of other people, whether it be our narrators or the many people they interviewed, or conclusions based off the evidence our narrators have collected. The world is built around these girls but they remain an overwhelming mystery. The biggest question being why they killed themselves.

                I really enjoyed this novel. I loved the tone and the obvious despair. I wanted answers as much as our narrators did. No one could ever understand how five sisters managed to kill themselves. Eugenides did a great job with how he told the story with the constant reflections of the girls and the nonchalant descriptions of how much life has changed in the present. The story exist in the present but is looking back at the time when the girls lived because the narrators can’t move beyond it. I think this book is simply really well executed and unique. I give this 4 out of 5 stars.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson

By -
Image
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson Bringing to life the story of a notorious pirate to a modern audience isn’t an easy task. We’re too used to the comfort of easy travel, the mythos of pirates and the commercialized imagery produced by movies and television. Images of Jack Sparrow and Long John Silver have been part of entertainment for so long that the idea of true piracy and all it’s ruthlessness has almost been washed away. It isn’t until you’re able to wash away the false images and submerge yourself into the actual history that you can see piracy for it’s truly brutal nature. It also brings up many questions about governments, laws, corporations, scandal, colonization and other factors that allowed piracy to flourish and exist in the manner that it did for so long. Piracy didn’t exist in a bubble. Enemy of All Mankind takes the story of one pirate, who helped usher in the Golden Age of Piracy, and exa
Read more

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack

By -
Image
Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack          In my case it is always the image of Odetta that comes to mind when I hear her name. The tall, undeniably Black woman, hair in an afro, guitar in hand. It must be that I simply did not know enough about her life, her struggle, and even her music to convey more than that image. But her image is memorable and her presence something not easily described. This book fills in the gaps in the story of Odetta that I didn’t know. Looking back at my childhood, her most memorable songs are the ones I’ve known most of my life, singing in my school’s chapel along with hundreds of other Black students, the words having meaning that I can only truly comprehend decades later as a Black woman.          Zack takes his time with this biography, letting the readers learn as much about Odetta as we do the time from whence she came. Her migration from Alabama to California, her feelings of coming from a loveless, forced marriage,
Read more

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

By -
Image
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood I’m going to cut right to the chase. This book is well written but we didn’t need it. I expected more. I wanted more and this fell flat. I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale , more than once, and I genuinely enjoyed it. The single narrative of Offred lent itself to the story well and it was genuinely a terrifying society. I watched the first two series of the show and though I have my reservations about it, I still thought it was a good show. It does a great job answering questions that the book could not because of its singular narrative. It filled out the world. This book revolves around three narratives: Aunt Lydia, who we know had a helping hand in stripping women of their sense of self and molded them to be controlled by the men of Gilead; Agnes, raised in Gilead with a Commander as father, privileged and set to marry well; and Daisy, a teenager raised in Canada hating Gilead and the abuses women endured that she’s learned about since she
Read more