The Virgin Suicides

Most recently, I finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides staggering novel, The Virgin Suicides.  To say it's a dark book about a family where the five daughters, each a year apart in age, enigmatically commit suicide, does not fairly present what makes this book one of my new favourites.

Naturally, I'm a sucker for dark and moody literature, which is what drew me to this selection.  The story alone is intriguing but once I delved deeper into the book, I discovered just how much more it had to offer.  It's told from the perspective of an unspecified narrator, though one can conclude that it is one of the many boy spectators in the neighbourhood that had been infatuated with these five daughters, the Lisbon girls, and is reporting on the suicides years after.  Eugenides uses a tremendous amount of imagery throughout the story.  At times it can be gory, so maybe this book isn't for everyone, but for the most part it sets the tone of the book and creates an ominous atmosphere, with themes of decay and grime and motifs of fish flies.  I'm not in school anymore/at the moment, but at one point in my life I really think I would enjoy an in depth analysis of this book.

You're never really given an inside look of what the girls are feeling because you, the reader, like the neighbourhood boys, are just outsiders looking in.  I actually liked this because there was an ambiguous curiosity I felt while reading which made it hard to put the book down.  More than it was a book about suicides and troubled teenage girls, it was a mystery novel.

Days later, I watched the movie by Sofia Coppola.  I think, had I not read the book, it would have been a movie I reeeally would have enjoyed and added to my list of favourites.  It told the story well and stayed quite true to the novel.  It's just that for me, the book was that good, that the movie just doesn't compare.  I felt incomplete at the end of it, wanting more satisfaction.  I wanted to feel the same way I did upon finishing the book and I simply did not.  I also wish it wasn't so Kirsten Dunst-centric.

All in all, I'll be recommending this book to people for a while.  Give it a try because it really is a masterfully sculpted piece of literature.

Pleasantly yours,
Bart