Feeling a tad bit rusty on revisiting my blog exactly a year later. Forgetting your login credentials is a big enough indicator to how long I have been away.
Trust me when I say I am reading great books and as the year progressed I found myself gravitating towards feminine themes, female characters, female authors and everything that came with that package. It was exciting!
After 23 years of its existence, Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides finds it way in my GoodReads Challenge last year. The fact that this review is way overdue is epically understated. It took me a while before I latched onto the play in the book title but let's just begin by acknowledging a glaring fact; Eugenides knows prose. He lets literature carry on this grim subject with poignancy in this gut-wrenching and heartbreaking narrative of the Lisbon sisters. There is no room for mindless dilly dally nor any sympathetic romanticised idea of the tragedy that occurs.
The book starts with death, teases you with the idea of young long, the kind that has sunflower fields, sunsets, power ballads and then all of sudden, in one swoop takes it all away. In all of that time, the five Lisbon sisters were forced to live a life they never wanted, find the kind of love that their families never understood and stay locked in like caged birds never to see the outside world again. The choice was obvious to them and with their actions, the impact last 20 years on the neighbourhood boys, the only people they remotely considered as friends.
It's sad, it's disturbing, its mesmerising. It's also only 250 pages.
Honestly, it is indeed quite difficult to describe the way The Virgin Suicides makes you feel. How do you recommend a book on suicide to someone? Yet, this is one book that leaves you with a lull and a want to read more it. After the tragedy occurs, the book does impart the idea that the Lisbon family fogged and disappeared little by little before the all eventually vanished with no trace.
Aside from the suicides, Eugenidies subtle commentary on the sleepy oblivious town and the marred memories of the neighboorhood boys are worth note. How does no one see the Lisbon's sister isolation as a plea for help? How does no one reach out to them with a second chance at life? A counter-argument would say how is it fair to the rest of the town, the schools and their lovers to proceed with their lives with all the trauma that left deep dents for years to come.
“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."
This quote from the book sums it up accurately.
If I was to take a highlighter to choose all of my favourite lines in this book, I would probably end up with neon pages. Every single sentence is well constructed and supported by strong theories to thoughts being delivered here. Sofia Coppola does a smashing job on the film as well. The AIR's soundtrack is one of my favourite albums till date.
This book is by far unbeatable on the subject of suicide and I can't wait to re-read it again.
Overall Rating: 5/5
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