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Summary: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Review: In The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Eugenides uses imagery and the narration of the novel to portray the impact of the girls' lives on the rest of the community. The profound imagery presented in this novel encapsulates the community in horror as the story of each girl's life ends. The mood and suspense of the novel were greatly enhanced by the in depth and sometimes gruesome or frightening imagery used by the author. Some examples of this are, the descriptions of where, when and why the girls killed themselves and the conditions in which they lived. The novel is told by five teenage boys that live surrounding the girls and stalk their everyday life. The novel was written to appeal specifically to the teenage audience, this allows the readers to relate to the novel, and enhances the message the writer is trying to get across. The authors' ambiguity is dripping off every page, which keeps the reader coming back for more excitement while writing about a difficult topic, suicide.
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Summary: Hilarious satire
Review: This is one of the wittiest novels I've read about those eternal favorites, sex and death. It's sly and tongue in cheek from start to (almost) finish, but like all good comedy plays it straight. Eugenides has an original voice that manages to combine lyricism and reportage in well-crafted and well-paced sentences. By interposing a couple of decades between the suicides and the narration, he gives himself the distance necessary for the narrative voice to interweave two strands: a loyally remembered early adolescent hormonal fixation on beautiful girls - humorous and poignant in itself - and a grown-up compulsion with accumulating historical data and eyewitness accounts that can't quite prevent a tendency to mythologize the past even while trying to recapture and understand it. The tension between then and now, between cold fact and emotional memory, makes the unnamed narrator's account serious in the telling but daffy to the core. He's a keen observer. Adolescent enthusiasm and adult nostalgia both inform the obsessive attention to details of old photographs, tubetops and brassieres, Rice Krispie treats wrapped in wax paper, canary yellow socks, shoe polish tins gouged to silver centers, and so on, a constant, colorful parade throughout the narrative. The past seems to cast a long shadow. Yet the eager, awkward boys who have grown up to have mournfully invoked thinning hair, soft bellies, and hearts filled with regret can only be in their 30s at the time of the story's telling. This burden-of-experience earnestness for men still so young is one of the novel's many amusements. The narrator's sensibilities are consciously over the top, with extravagant statements such as the claim that the boys' experiences with the Lisbon sisters "have scarred us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives." It's supported by the fact that as adults they've refurbished the childhood tree house they abandoned as teenagers and turned it into a museum to the sisters. The vividly evoked and often oddball minor characters - neighbors, students, ambulance drivers, doctors, reporters - are funny because of their deadpan earnestness, even while they utter profound banalities that would sink a less clever novel. Here, their affidavit-like statements tickle the reader's funnybone. All the conventional reasons for suicide are proposed without ever quite solving the mystery of why the sisters killed themselves. The decay of the Lisbon house after the first suicide is so carefully tracked that it's impossible not to get the joke - the house as metaphor for the human condition is an old chestnut of creative writing, but the progressive dilapidation of the Lisbon house is delineated with a skillful morbidity that makes fun of itself. Apart from Lux Lisbon, the doomed sisters aren't differentiated, because they aren't really remembered as individuals. They are real enough, but they are mostly icons of desire. Although numerous named boys act and speak, and the handsome Trip Fontaine emerges as a temporary main character, the story isn't really about any of them, either. It's about all of them. Despite occasional specific locational references that suggest a single narrator, the universal authorial references to "us," "we," and "our" ("She had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us") make the narrative voice not one person speaking on behalf of the many, but literally the collective voice of the boys whose imaginative lives revolve around their beautiful neighbors. This monotypic treatment of the lumpen adolescent psyche is one of the novel's most humorous elements. Another achievement is the light touch in evoking facts of life in an affluent Detroit suburb during the 1970s, including fashions, pop music, pollution, and Dutch elm blight. As he concludes his comic romp, Eugenides smoothly shifts on the last two pages to a quiet, elegiac finish. Having smiled often since page one, you close the book with the satisfaction of finishing a very pleasurable read.
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Summary: A Look into the Dark Underside of Suburbia
Review: The Virgin Suicides is tale of lost innocence told with great precision and eloquence. Right from the start the reader is drawn into the world and passions of yound men who swoon over the young Lisbon girls. The Virgin Suicides is a thour-de-force ground-breaking, breakout novel.
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Summary: fantastic , story
Review: I first had seen the movie , then read the book. I really like how the story is told by the boys in the neighborhood that loved them ( the Girls ) and only was trying to understand them. The story offered such beautiful language to discribe the Girls and the era of the 70's and the trials of their short lifes.I also was pleased with the ending of the book.
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Summary: Lovely
Review: This is a brilliant story about a family consisting of daughters. The Lesbon girls are famous among the neiborhood boys. The story is based on the lives of the young beauties and how the guys try to decode their habitual lifestyles. The story ends with all committing suicide. What a fantastic read. I could not put it down. The movie is fantastic although like most made from books movies it doesn not hold all the minor details tha make the story that much more important.
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Summary: Stunningly haunting
Review: I have never known a book to create such ambience so effectively. Eugenides expresses emotion and atmosphere in such vivid yet simple ways that it catches you almost offguard and before you realise you are consumed by this world he has created. Told from the point of view of the boys, the reader gets a sense watching from behind the bushes, spying, as that was essentially what the boys were doing; worshipping from afar. Details in this book will haunt you for weeks afterward. What's more, the details are so arbitrary and non-threatening you will surprise yourself. The sense of satisfaction felt after reading this book is immense; as if you were looking into a secret.
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Summary: Beautiful.
Review: I love the way Eugenides writes. It's soo incredibly descriptive that I can exactly imagine in my mind the scenery in the book and the actions portrayed by the characters. It's also one of those books that you can never seem to put down because you're just wondering what is going to happen next... everything in the story just seems to flow. I'm one of those people who read the book after watching the movie and I must say, as much as I enjoyed the movie, I LOVED the book even more because it added much more to the story that I was used to in the movie. But be forewarned, the book is pretty depressing and creepy at times (it is afterall, about suicides), also the reader does not exactly know anything about the Lisbon family except for what is being told by a neighborhood kid, from his point of view and what he has "heard". So some might say that there isn't exactly a plot in the story, but that's the point, you're supposed to just follow along from another's perspective of the family. THAT is the point of the book. This is definitely a book I would enjoy reading more than once.
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Summary: Otherworldly, Fascinating, Darkly Enlightening
Review: Described as well as I can by the words above, this book is eerie, amazing, and beautiful. You know you have a good author when the questions and plot don't even get answered or wind up, and you're still completely satisfied when you've turned the last page. Buy this book. PLEASE. You can't go wrong.
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Summary: GRIPPING
Review: From the moment I picked this book up I could not put it down. Even in some of the slow parts I knew I had to keep reading because I was so intrigued.
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Summary: Don't see the movie
Review: This is the most depressing book I've read in a long time if not ever. It is also one of the best. Over the course of about a year beginning with the youngest the Lisbon family loses all its daughters. This is not a spoiler because we know this from the first sentense of the novel. What we don't know is the course of that year or why this family is so wrought. If you're a reader looking for answers, though, don't read this book. You won't find any. The book is not about the sisters themselves, but the boys who loved them from afar and the mythical images of the sisters they conjured. They tell the story of the sisters to us, not as a know narrator as it happens, but as a royal we writing years later trying to understand the women who have haunted their hearts their entire lives. The real sisters emerge only in tantalizing bits barely glimsed, like the body of a fan dancer...enough so we understand the power they had over these men as boys and have even today. I can mark two truly amazing things Eugenides does. First, in a novel whose final outcome is know he maintains not only suspense, but a desire in the reader for it not to happen. As the inevitable end draws near around page 200 the book becomes painful to read. A sense of loss builds as our narrators relate the night they thought they could save the surviving sisters even though we know (as do they as they relate the tale) that they will fail. When the end comes its nature and horror hit them like a brick, both when it happened and in relating it twenty years later. You will be no less stunned. Certainly I was, leaving me weeping at the bus stop as I read. Eugenides has mastered the trip that is more important than its destination. The second compelling part of the novel is the fact that as you read it you cannot help creating your own version of the sisters. The reader himself winds up doing what the boys do, creating mythological perfect madiens to pursue from the doomed girls. Their compelling nature, their allure shine throughout the book and in the end we feel the loss just as deeply as the tellers of the tale (especially painful was Therese, who seemed so close to escaping fate and who I could not help but imagine as the girl of my dreams). If, as the Greeks thought, the purpose of tragedy is catharsis this book is peer of the great Greek tragedies. One thing that has changed since reading this book, however, is I will not see the movie. While it may convey the events of the book quite well, the soul of the book is the internal path of allure, love, fantasy, and loss taken by the narrators. As I said this is, in many ways, their story, not the story of the girls. Film, for all its virtues, is not the medium to carry what really matters about this book. Since I finished yesterday I've read the last page four or five times, as well as other scenes. I know I'll think about it for days and want to talk about it. I'm sure The Virgin Suicides will haunt me for days. I cannot think of a better compliment for a novel.
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