About this title: An obsessive homage that begins as a detective story and ends without a solution. In a prosperous Detroit suburb during the early 1970s, all five daughters of the Lisbon family commit suicide in a succession of acts that stuns their friends as much by its incomprehensibility as its violence. One of the boys who grew up with the sisters attempts, 20 years after the fact, to uncover whatever secret motivated the girls and, through his search, provides the narrative that makes up most of the tale. It turns out that most of the boys in the neighborhood were in love with one or another of the ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Warner Books
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780446670258ISBN:0446670251
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Softcover, only minor cover shopwear, pp lightly tanned, but--APPEARS NOT READ. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 249 pp. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Warner Books
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780446670258ISBN:0446670251
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Softcover, only minor cover shopwear, pp lightly tanned, but--APPEARS NOT READ. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 249 pp. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. 034910543X Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Edition: March 2000 reissue of 1994 Warner Books printing.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Warner Books
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780446670258ISBN:0446670251
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Like-new condition with no page markings & uncreased, square spine. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 256 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN-13:9780374284381ISBN:0374284385
Description: Good. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
"The one thing that really got my attention was the first person plural narrative. A few men, now in their thirties, narrate the story that marked their adolescence and entire life so far: the suicide of the 5 mysterious Lisbon sisters (their school mates and neighbors), teenagers in an American suburb in the 70's. Haunted by this, they try to understand what made the girls do that, fishing for evidence, interviewing neighbors and trying to figure out things. However, it's not a detective fiction of any type, the tone is rather nostalgic and elegiac. Interesting reading, not as captivating as I expected, but very well written in its way.
*** We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. 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. 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."
""On the morning the last Lisbon sister took her turn at suicide--it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese--the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beams in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope."
Thus begins one of the strangest novels I have read, but one that is remarkably captivating. The book is narrated by a group of now-grown, but then-adolescent boys who lived on the same block as the Lisbon sisters, and who were obsessed with them. They are presenting their "evidence"--memories of the incident from their past, which they have never quite managed to understand. The book begins with the retelling of the youngest sister's first suicide attempt, and then carries us through the subsequent months with the family. Just like the narrator/s, the readers find themselves searching for clues, to understand why a young, pretty girl would resort to suicide. But as anyone who has ever lost someone they loved to suicide knows, this is not an understandable act, and by the end of the novel, the narrator/s--and we--are no closer to understanding the girls' choice than we were when it began.
This is one of the few books that I read after I saw the movie, but it didn't affect my reading adversely. On the contrary, as I got to each part in the book I could see the scene in the movie clearly (one of my favorite parts of that movie is when Kirsten Dunst makes out with Josh Hartnett in a car to the song "Crazy on You"). The movie was good too--even Dunst was good in it, and that's saying a lot, because I am not a fan of her acting in anything else. And Hartnett was adorable."
"The suicide death of a young girl throws her parents into a state of panic concerning the lives of their remaining four beautiful daughters. The girls become prisoners in their home as their mother obsesses over their well-being, refusing to allow them to go out. The neighbor boy (narrator) and his friends seek out ways to communicate with the house-bound girls. Meanwhile, they imagination runs wild about what the girls are really like, how they live and how they will rescue them. Haunting and well-written, this story is not only tragic but campy. A mesmerizing read, it is difficult to put down."
"I saw the movie about five years ago and hated it - thought it was insufferably pretentious, inappropriately clean, and vaguely anti-girl. But a friend convinced me to give the book a chance, and oh wow, have I ever misjudged The Virgin Suicides.
It's 1970s Michigan, and a quiet suburb suddenly becomes the center of national attention when five sisters commit suicide in succession, leaving everyone else to desperately search for the exact source of the Lisbon girls' unhappiness. And that's what makes this novel so haunting - the perfect evocation of a cheery, ice-cream-colored world barely containing some mysterious, almost primordial female power that's hell-bent on blasting its way out. The boys who make up the novel's collective "we" seem to suspect that their efforts to explain the suicides are futile at best, but that doesn't stop them from building a full dossier anyway.
A tip of the hat, too, to Eugenides for nailing the uneasy collective identities that form among small-town teenagers, as well as that cataloging gaze that comes from everywhere and nowhere.
Otherwise, The Virgin Suicides is a novel of pluses and minuses. The narration is sometimes searing but sometimes meandering. The prose is mostly excellent with occasional rough patches. (For the record, I listened to the audiobook, and one of the interesting things about audiobooks is that every clunker of a sentence suddenly offends your ear in a way that might have passed unnoticed in text.) Some of the symbolism is striking and frightening, some is unbelievably lame (The trees on the street all have Dutch elm disease! It's a metaphor, you guys!) Definitely worth it for the good parts, though."
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