Review: The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having been a suicidal teenage girl, being friends with lots of suicidal girls, still suffering from depression... this is a strange book to me. I remember watching and being fascinated by the movie. I loved the book's prose, what lots of people have written about it, how evocative, hazy and sensual it is.

But while reading I kept remembering that it was written by a man. Someone here wrote that the book is more the story of the boys watching the Lisbon girls than of the girls themselves and I believe that. I like those sort of books though, the ones written by men romanticizing and idolazing women, showing us how they view us as incomprehensible but tantallizing creatures.

I guess that's why Sofia Coppola wanted to direct it, thought at times the sheer distance and bafflement of the boys is faintly offensive. Girls locked up in a house and not permitted to go to school or get a job or find any way out of their situation and you wonder why they killed themselves? No shit Sherlock...

I thought the most real bit of insight the boys had on the Lisbon girls was when they realized Lux had made advances on them only to give her sisters time to die in peace... I wonder why the author let Mary live only to kill herself again? I would have let her live, the way the author let Lux have sex: a reminder to the narrators that their mythical suicidal virgins weren't as suicidal or as virginal as they wanted to imagine them to be.

View all my reviews