THE VIRGIN
SUICIDES
by Jeffrey Eugenides

Cover Summary
The five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric and, now, gone – had always been a point of obsession for the entire neighbourhood.
Although the boys that once loved them from afar have grown up, they remain determined to understand a tragedy that has defied explanation. The question persists – why did all five of the Lisbon girls take their own lives?
This lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes subarban middle-American life announced the arrival of one of the greatest American novelists of the last thirty years.
Reading The Virgin Suicides
Like Lolita, this is a cult classic that’s always swimming around your town’s library growing up but it’s somehow always on loan to someone else and you never manage to read it. But you really want to! It promises naughty things, sex, suicide, unspeakable things that you’re dying (excuse my puns) to find out all about when you’re a teen.
Apart from that, I’d never found a cover I liked well enough to actually buy this until this one surfaced on BookDep, so it took me a teenagehood and a half to finally read it. Having said that, I’m glad I’ve read it in my twenties because I could really savour every drop of teenage angst and messiness it brought!


What I loved
Sex and suicide are my jam
For some oddly weird reason, possibly because the world of sex did not present itself to me in my childhood, I’m very enamoured with reading nymphette-type stories. This has a really lovely way of presenting the subliminal sexuality of girls growing up; their scents of femalehood, hands feeling small waists underneath oversized clothing, underwear drawn on with black ink. I loved how the author treated the delicacy but surmounting sexual presence of the girls, and also that he coupled it with death. Less obvious but definitely hinted, the themes of domestic abuse and religious fundamentalism (to an extent) were also cleverly weaved in, and got me thinking and looking up other reader’s reviews to see what they thought of it all.
The Lisbon Girls (but especially Lux)
Oh Lux, you would have loved Lana Del Rey and filling your Insta feed with photos of daises littered over your thighs! The girls are not given equal treatment, and Lux becomes the focal point of their activity and the boys’ fascination with the Lisbon girls. She’s deviously sexual, a true rebel at heart and a little bit fragile, but would rather die than let you catch that. I think her character was developed gorgeously.
Poetic Verbiage
Some quotes, like the one below, I knew by heart before I even read this book. I think sometimes that’s what makes a cult classic. The fact that a line embeds itself into your mind for life.
“What we have here is a dreamer. Somebody completely out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she could fly.”
What I wasn’t too keen about
The Perspective
This book’s point of view is the neighbouring boys’, who study every move the Lisbon girls make, secretly collect their discarded belongings, and carry their fascination with them all their lives and carry out a sort of investigation by interviewing neighbours and gathering evidence to try to understand the girls’ motives behind the suicides. Readers online keep raving about what a genius Eugenides is for taking this narrator’s perspective, but I found it quite limiting because I wanted more of the girls’ lives and thoughts, and less of the boys’ long descriptions about their interviewees later on.
The Suicides
This book is 243 pages long, and only half a page was dedicated to the remaining four girls’ suicides, and I would definitely have liked a whole chapter, more build up and details (we are here for the tea, after all). I felt that a lot was wasted between Cecilia’s suicide and the other four girls’ as well. While this in-between time shows the deterioration of the girls’ conditions under their strict parents’ regime, a lot was also spent delving into other, unrelated neighbour’s lives which didn’t really interest me as much as the suicides themselves.

All in all…

I have this issue with cult classics where I expect a masterpiece and end up being quite disappointed while reading the thing, but then go back to think about it again and again.
I cannot not recommend The Virgin Suicides, it’s one of those books that should be in every serious 30 year old bookworm’s library and you can brag a little about how cultured you are that you’ve added it to your read list.
It wasn’t the spellbinding, mind twisting novel I had hoped for, but I did really like it. It makes me think of sleepy sunny mornings underneath my sheets. Ripe peaches bitten into by small teeth under clear blue skies, juice running down my arms. Girly shrieks and giggles running away from the boys. Your first kiss. And laying down in the lawn, skin still hot from the summer sun, daydreaming of illicit adventures in the backseat of a car, hoping, dismaying, maybe wanting to die. Just being a female teenager and a little nuts.