Acquire As Virgens Suicidas Authored By Jeffrey Eugenides Shown In Manuscript
struggled with this book, On several levels.
On one hand, The Virgin Suicides is an introspective exploration of some of the problems ofs suburbia, and of our societys tendency to look at suicide and the trauma of young girls as something dangerous, rather than real.
This narrative is told through the point of view of the boys around the girls, It purposefully fetishizes the pain and trauma of the five, attempting to critique this same fetishization, We barely know the tragedy of Cecilia, but she herself is almost erased by the male narrators, who make her death into a case they can solve via the exhibits.
They treat her death as true crime, not a true tragedy, and thus fail to solve any mystery at all.
They must learn to see the girls as actual human beings,
This critique works, to some extent it is the sisters themselves where the book falls apart.
The five suicidal virgin sisters are, despite incidental moments of characterization, a monolith they are used as representations of some deeper societal problem, rather than people.
They are at once sexualized and devoid of sexuality their deaths are fetishized to such a degree by the lead group of boys that they cease to exist at all.
In other words, the five sisters are at once given agency, and then have their agency taken away by a narrative that refuses them any room to tell their own stories.
I believe the authorial intent here may have been the former the result, to me, is the latter.
I also struggle with the weird fascination with destruction of gender roles in the home brought on by a close text reading of this the girls father, Mr.
Lisbon is more feminine, with a “girlish voice”his daughters “forgot he was a male and discussed their menstruation openly in front of him”.
This is not an uncommon problem in media I actually read this for a class on concepts of adolescence in which we also watched Rebel Without a Cause, and yep, the father in that is overly feminine, too.
I still dislike it, as well as the narratives focus on Mrs, Lisbon as the source of the girls trauma,
Eugenides writing is gorgeous in places, but feels so cold and removed towards its characters that I found myself put off.
There is some good here a discussion on the ways teachers attempt to deal with the suicide is welldone, and a scene in which the Reverend equates suicide with not winning title gameis both hilarious and deeply sad.
Adults try to put Celias suicide on her crooked nature, not on her actual life this precludes the suicides of the other three.
The imagery around the decay of the house is compelling, I also want to acknowledge that this was a good deal more revolutionary when it was written in, This book is not terrible and Im glad Ive read it for myself its just that when it comes down to the wire, I gained very little from this reading experiences.
sitelinkBlog sitelinkGoodreads sitelinkTwitter sitelinkInstagram sitelinkYoutube I had to take some time after reading this and do some deep thinking before I could review.
It is such an unusual story good, but dark and full of nooks and crannies for skeletons and other vermin to hide.
It is hard to say I enjoyed a story like this that would be like saying I enjoyed a car wreck intriguing, but lots of people and property were damaged in the process.
One main thing I can say is I don't think I have seen the main story take as much of a back seat to the setting, the symbolism, and the side characters.
The book is "The Virgin Suicides", but they might be the least important, as well as the most important, part of the book.
Are you confused yet
Setting: The neighborhood, the houses, the tree house, the school, Description of buildings. The importance of a location, Certain windows serving as stages into the performance of people's lives, All very complex and interesting,
Coated in muck: Throughout the book things are covered in dust, slime, dead bugs, etc, Everything is made to seem like it is coated, and a deeper truth is underneath, And, I think it is important that the "coating" is never pretty, Things aren't coated in sugar, or clouds, or pretty makeup, It is always foul, stinking, decaying, etc,
Symbolism As the story deteriorates, so do the structures and the people, Buildings decay. People become more and more unstable, Every element spirals into a gloomy miasma and it moves towards the ultimate sad climax,
The boys the boys in the story serving as narrators really kept making me think of Stand By Me or The Sandlot.
Coming of age. Looking into other people's lives, Trying to figure things out while wrapped in the innocence of youth, It was a very intriguing approach to telling the story,
I think that many will enjoy this, Just remember that it is dark and somewhat disturbing, Not something to read while looking for a pick me up! I don't even really know what to say.
I think maybe a few people are going to be disappointed that I didn't give this five, and I mean, I'm upset that it wasn't five either, but hear me out.
The thing I liked the most about this book is the perspective, We're learning aboutgirls who commit suicide, . and we NEVER hear anything substantial from any of the sisters It was genius, The way this book was written is brilliant, Honestly, every couple of pages I would think to myself "When Jeffrey Eugenides thought to himself that he should write this from the outside view he had one of the best epiphanies ever.
Ever. " The second thing I liked was the realism, This book is just so true, so pure, It isn't false in anyway, it states it how it is: sad and depressing and demoralizing and harsh and upsetting.
But true.
Why didn't I love this book I don't know, I honestly, I don't know, There was something missing. Maybe it was my disconnect from the story, maybe it was my lack of real care for any of the events or characters, or maybe it was the lack of plot.
When I'm true to myself, I could act like this was the best book, I could write and essay about how life altering this book is, but it's a lie.
Maybe for other people it is that, but for me it wasn't, Sometimes, you just don't connect to a book, and I didn't, I don't know. La verdad es que me he pensado darle esta nota, En lo que llevo de año las novelas que han tenido la puntuación máxima han sido más bien pocas, y es en parte porque me quise exigir un poco más y ser más duro con mis reseñas.
Pero Las vírgenes suicidas lo ha conseguido, Podría decir que me la he leído en un día, pues desde la páginaa lahan sido apenas unas pocas horas de viaje.
Pero han parecido meses. Y esa es la magia de la novela, La narración es espectacular, con un estilo bastante peculiar que te sumerge por completo en la historia pese a que la historia se cuenta de manera difusa.
No nos encontramos con un caso de misterio sobre por qué estas jóvenes se suicidan, que es lo que yo esperaba encontrar y que por la sinopsis, parece ser el tema del libro, sino más bien con algo más intimista.
Es una novela que estudia muchas cosas: las apariencias, los falsos juicios basados en suposiciones, la familia, la opresión.
. . Es más que curioso darte cuenta de cómo realmente no llegas a conocer a las hermanas Lisbon pero crees conocerlas, algo con lo que Eugenides juega muy bien.
Lo que más puedo elogiar es la narración, porque como digo, aunque no cuenta realmente nada de un modo objetivo o adorne un par de acciones con historias de otros personajes completamente secundarios, te mantiene en vilo, tragándote sus palabras.
Me gusta que un autor tenga esa magia, Y en este caso, es magia de verdad, sin trucos, Pura. I did like the writing and narrative style of the book but I didn't love it as much as I had thought I would.
The premise of the book seemed promising I love depressing books but it didn't resonate with me, It felt strange watching an experience similar to your own through the perspective of someone who is witnessing what's happening, especially when it's told in a way romanticizing something that's quite ugly in reality.
Also the explanations they come up with the end seemed ridiculous, they didn't even consider the most obvious one: .
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
As an ambulance arrives for the body of Mary Lisbon, a group of anonymous neighborhood boys recall the events leading up to her death.
The Lisbon's are a Catholic family, living in the suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the's,
The father, Ronald, is a math teacher at the local high school, The mother is a homemaker, The family has five daughters:yearold Cecilia,yearold Lux,yearold Bonnie,yearold Mary, andyearold Therese,
Without warning, Cecilia attempts suicide by slitting her wrists in the
bathtub, She is found in time and survives, A few weeks later, their parents allow the girls to throw a chaperoned party at their house in hopes of cheering Cecilia up.
However, Cecilia excuses herself from the party, goes upstairs, and jumps out of her bedroom window,
She is impaled on the fence post below, and she dies almost immediately, The Lisbon parents begin to watch their four remaining daughters more closely, which isolates the family from their community.
Cecilia's death also heightens the air of mystery about the Lisbon sisters to the neighborhood boys, who long for more insight into the girls' lives.
تاریخ نخستین خواش: روز هفدهم ماه اکتبر سالمیلادی
عنوان: خودکشی باکره نویسنده: جفری اوگنیدس مترجم: محمد رحیمی تهران انتشارات میلکاندرص شابکموضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا سدهم
گروهی از پسرانی که با یکدیگر دوست هستند به چند خواهر مرموز که در خانواده ی خشک و مذهبیشان به شدت تحت مراقب هستند علاقمند میشوند در تابستان جوانترین خواهر سیسیلیا در حمام اقدام به خودکشی و بریدن رگ مچ دستش میکند سپس والدینش برای اینکه حال او بهتر شود او را به یک پارتی از پیش تعیین شده سوق میدهند سیسیلیا برای دومین بار با پریدن از پنجره ی اتاق خواب طبقه دوم و برخورد به میله های حصار آهنی جان خود را از دست میدهد و, . .
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی هجری خورشیدی ا. شربیانی: Read this with my springGrowing Up class, Maybe a regrettable topic in this time of severe mental health challenges within the isolation and other madnesses of Covid.
Original review: As I approach the El every day the first thing that greets me is the suicide hotline posters.
Theyre everywhere as the suicide rates go up, I grew up in the sixties and in the seventies I worked a suicide hotline, I worked in a psych hospital where I recall as vividly as five minutes ago several suicide attempts, and some completions.
Family members, too. You never quite get over it, all the emotions, rage, sorrow, the mystification,
I had three sisters, and I lived in this girlcentric home, slumber parties, makeup, frizzy combs, lotions, girl books and whispers, and I never even dated until my senior year in high school.
Girls were a mystery to me and I was stymied about how to approach them, I on Mars, they on Venus.
I first read Jeffery Eugenides The Virgin Suicides inwhen it came out this time I read it with some students in a kind of small seminar on Growing Up novels.
I thought then and think now that it is one of the great novels, It features a narrator with a first person plural pronoun, a group of boys obsessed with a group of five sisters, in Grosse Point, north of Detroit, in the mid sixties its ending is given away in the first sentence.
Or in the title, actually, so the question is not so much what happened but why, and the answers the boys, now men, come up with are not definitive.
This is the story unnamed boysand later, mentell of Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary and Therese: “all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh” but this is from the boys perspective, that male gaze, remember how the girls see themselves remains a mystery to the boys.
For the boys these girls seem the sum of the catalogue they compile of their artifacts: “a room full of crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death, a crucifix draped with a brassier, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many girls becoming women together in the same cramped space.
”
The tone here is sometimes black comedy, boys obsessed about girls, haha, but who cares, we know that, yet the story heads deeper into a consideration of what we can actually know about anyone else.
In this case, a group of boys are curious about the natures of five girls who are cooped up in a house primarily by their mother.
Why are they what they seem to be Can they know them The short answer is no, This question of why is also relevant in this book to those who commit suicide, Why And well never know for sure, Well, you get to decide, but Eugenides will not make it easy for you, In the process of their investigation, the boys/men gather evidence into various “exhibits” to try and determine who these girls really are,
“.
. . drifting in slow motion past us, while we pretended we hadnt been looking at them at all, that we didnt know they existed.
”
In the process one boy not in the geeky narrator group, a kind of James Dean sex god, Trip Fontaine, a boy that many girls seem to obsess about, actually asks Lux out and successfully navigates an ultimately disastrous prom date, after which things get progressively worse, more repressive.
So there is a touch of sex and unrequited love and all the emotions pertaining to that, in gothic teen fashion, all Wuthering Heightsish driven mad by desire, thats in here.
But it is not clichéd, and the narrators are not grossly at least primarily sexobsessed about the girls: “.
. . we thought if we kept looking hard enough we might begin to understand what they were feeling and who they were.
”
Throughout the book, various people pose explanations, theories for why the girls do what they do:
“Capitalism has resulted in material wellbeing but spiritual bankruptcy.
”
“The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us, ”
“Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in midstride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
”
“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.
”
“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in.
. . ”
“She wanted out of that decorating scheme, ”
“With most people suicide is like Russian roulette, Only one chamber has a bullet, With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded, A bullet for family abuse, A bullet for genetic predisposition, A bullet for historical malaise, A bullet for inevitable momentum, The two other bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty, ”
“The repression of sexual urges” and I have to say I recalled at this point the newsas I recall itthat in the seventies the greatest concentration of stds occurred in ones of the places with the most churches, Zeeland, MI close to where I grew up.
Wethat collective male wethought of that as sadly hilarious,
“ the destruction of Luxs rock records, . . ”
“. . the bland uniformity of that place, . . ”
“Basically what we have here is a dreamer, Somebody out of touch with reality, When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly, ”
“Don't waste your time on life, ”
Maybe the why has to do with a loosely gothic frame for the story in the inevitably tragic demise of the family this is never hidden from us, so cant constitute a spoiler to reveal, the madness of adolescence is central as with Jane Eyre, there are “madwomen” upstairs, and as in Poes “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the very house they live in begins to collapse in ruin and decay.
Dutch Elm Disease, fish flies, the rich smells of decay are everywhere even as the girls are largely confined indoors.
The girls seem from the beginning like ghosts,
But in the end, in this investigation, this inquiry, mystery alone remains the girls, as girls, as humans, are unknowable to the boys:
“In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
”
The boys seem wisest when they just stand amazed or bewildered or not knowing, as in speaking of:
“.
. . her inexplicable heart. ”
“All wisdom ends in paradox, ”
“I dont know what youre feeling, I wont even pretend. ”
“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
”
In the end, The Virgin Suicides is about our ultimate unknowability from each other, boys from girls, girls from boys, humans from humans, who we are, why we do what we do, as hard as we try.
And it was an exhilarating trip down sixties memory lane for me, With some wonderful writing.
Some relevant films/books: Penelope Spheeris Suburbia suburbs, punk, Revolutionary Road sixties, The Ice Storm sixties, Ordinary People suburbs, suicide, Todd Solonzs Happiness suburbs, sex, any John Waters film youth and pop culture, American Beauty sex and despair, Stepford Wives suburban conformity, Peyton Place suburban sexual intrigue, Larry Clarks Kids brutal teen realism, The Sweet Hereafter teen tragedy and social trauma, Ghost World teen urban girls Heathers teen girls, suicideReasons Why suicide, Goethes The Sorrows of Young Werther suicide, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights gothic, Poes “The Fall of the House of Usher,” gothic and on and on.
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