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    The Virgin Suicides
    The Virgin Suicides
    The Virgin Suicides
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Virgin Suicides

    Written by Jeffrey Eugenides

    Narrated by Nick Landrum

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 6, 2008
    ISBN9781436144018
    The Virgin Suicides
    Author

    Jeffrey Eugenides

    Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of three novels. His first, The Virgin Suicides (1993), is now considered a modern classic. Middlesex (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and both Middlesex and The Marriage Plot (2011) were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Fresh Complaint, a collection of short stories, was published in 2017. He is a member both of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and The American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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    Reviews for The Virgin Suicides

    4/5

    262 ratings123 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A story of a family of mysterious girls seen from an outsiders perspective. The book focuses on the history of the family told by a narrator who lived down the street. It works well as it slowly reveals more and more about the girls and the family. It is written very well. Can be dry, but the tone usually fits the aspect of the story. The story is very sad and the author does a good job of creating empathy for the characters. I really enjoyed the book and felt I got a lot out of it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A weird but terribly compelling tale, set in a middle class town in 1970s Michigan. Narrated not by any one character but by a 'Greek chorus' of the local boys; every event told from the 'we' perspective. They recall the Lisbon family - schoolteacher father, overprotective Catholic mother and their five lovely daughters. After the youngest - and strangest - commits suicide, the family begins to crack up. We never really know what propels the other daughters to eventually follow suit: the loss of their sister? their abnormal home life? something genetic? The whole narrative is kind of Gothic, dreamy, other-worldly; just as we never get a real handle on the several narrators, so too the girls are seen only through their eyes and their recollections and opinions- like watching them in a mirror rather than really knowing them.I've never read anything like this, an incredible feat of writing.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I'm sure there are some themes and metaphors that went over my head, but I don't care. I was so excited for this book. I wanted to find out how and why these girls killed each other. I thought we would get to see that. Instead, we follow some obsessed neighbourhood teens who idolize and fantasize about these girls whom they've only talked to once or twice, and who share some sick, twisted desires and do some very disturbing things together out of their mad obsession with everything the girls do. I was disgusted. Those throwaway comments that added absolutely nothing but disgust for these boys took away one star. Another star was lost because of how no one seemed to even conceive the idea that maybe, just maybe, these girls thought to end themselves because of how suffocatingly they were raised. There doesn't even seem to have even been a police investigation on the parents questioning how 5 teenagers living under one roof would simply decide to end their lives. I'll keep 3 stars because it was mostly interesting, like 70%, but the other 30% was just words filling a page to make the book longer. It should have been a novella or short story. This was not necessary. Anyway, enjoy.
    • 3/5
      Don't tell anyone but they all die in the end.
    • 4/5
      I read this book at exactly the right age - 13 or 14 or so, and I absolutely loved it.

      It was brooding and melancholy and sad and sentimental and beautiful. It had a depth to it but the prose was simple so I just read it from almost cover to cover. I remember this book because I read it at a stage where I wasn't entirely sure what kind of books I wanted to read, and I really enjoyed this one.

      I do still remember some of the quotations or passages from the book. So, it's stayed with me, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it. Angsty teenaged girls might not be your favourite subject but that doesn't mean you should avoid it completely. c:

      It's very evocative and emotive and it really struck a chord with me. It would be interesting to reread it after so many years.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating good read!
    • 4/5
      This is a deeply thoughtful examination of suicide, from many points of view, in many different aspects. It is beautifully written.
    • 4/5
      I made it through this one but can say right away that I wouldn’t recommend it for winter reading or for those who have struggled or are struggling with depression. The feeling is a bit similar to the feeling I got from The Bell Jar (which I also intentionally read during the summer). I’ve had to read this one in snippets and while out in the sun to combat that oppressive feeling. Overall, I think it was pretty good. The back end of it lightened up a little bit and wasn't quite as depressing (though the content is still a bit rough). I don't know that I'll be recommending this to many people unless it's up their alley, just for the oppressive feeling it emits.
    • 3/5
      I was actually a bit disappointed in this. I love this movie. I mean I've seen it dozens of times, but I think I was expecting....more from the book. It wasn't bad, I just wasn't really impressed.

      I felt that the story dragged on quite a bit an left me bored. I get that the book is written in the 'outside looking in' perspective of these boys who have watched and loved the girls for forever, but I was a bit creeped out. Like I closed my curtains because, do people really pay THAT much attention to what goes on in other people's houses? Creepy.

      Loved the movie. Love the story, as sad and disturbing as it is. Found the book lacking.
    • 4/5
      The Virgin Suicides is a very good coming of age story that is told in the style of a chronicle. It shows beautifully how a family comes completely undone by tragedy and how they then create their own continuing tragedy. Unfortunately it felt very YA-ish to me, and I was hoping for something that felt more adult, even with the coming of age theme.
    • 5/5
      I knew the rough plot already from having seen the movie years ago, but the book still managed to blow me away. The language was gorgeous and sumptuous, which made an amazing contrast to the somber subject of the novel. I will pick up another book by Eugenides soon, to see how he weaves words around a different subject. Anyone have a particular recommendation?

      It's been a long time since I was so impressed with both the command of language (such descriptions!) and the mastery of plot and pacing.
    • 4/5
      Ik heb lang geaarzeld voor ik aan dit boek begon: de titel, de Virgin Suicides, leek me zo opzichtig gericht op goedkoop commercieel succes, want een spannende cocktail van erotiek en dramatiek belovend, dat het boek onmogelijk goed kon zijn. Maar de vele lovende recensies deden me toch overstag gaan. En gelukkig maar, want dit is één van de betere boeken die ik de laatste jaren gelezen heb, en dan vooral omdat het een meesterwerk van misleiding is. Dit boek – in tegenstelling tot wat veel recensies doen geloven – gaat helemaal niet over hoe 5 meisjes van eenzelfde gezin (niet eens allemaal maagden, al zou je maagdelijkheid natuurlijk ook kunnen opvatten als onschuld) ertoe kwamen zelfmoord te plegen. Neen, al na enkele pagina’s weet je dat ze alle vijf zelfmoord zullen plegen, en krijg je ook te horen dat we nooit zullen weten waarom ze het deden. Dat is dus niet de insteek van Eugenides, al weet hij natuurlijk maar al te goed dat we zullen blijven doorlezen in de hoop aanwijzingen te vinden en toch tot een sluitende verklaring te komen. En de auteur is pervers genoeg om die aanwijzingen rijkelijk rond te strooien, of op zijn minst onze verbeelding in die richting te prikkelen. Waar het dan wel om gaat? Wel, naar mijn mening, biedt het vertelstandpunt, het achterhalen van wie eigenlijk de auteur is achter wie Eugenides zich verschuilt, de sleutel tot dit werk. En hier speelt Eugenides pas echt een pervers spel met de lezer. Van in het begin is een onbepaalde “we” aan het woord, van wie je de indruk hebt dat het om één of meerdere buurtjongens van de meisjes gaat. Het is ook eerst niet duidelijk hoe ver in de toekomst die verteller(s) zich bevindt (bevinden). Maar mondjesmaat krijg je informatie, en dan nog alleen als je er heel goed op let, en pas op het einde valt alles op zijn plaats. Het lijkt een retorisch spelletje, en ik kan me inbeelden dat niet veel mensen dit soort spelletjes kunnen appreciëren, maar het werkt wel. En vooral omdat het even duurt voor je doorhebt dat dit vertellersstandpunt de eigenlijke originaliteit van het werk uitmaakt.En zo kom je uit bij de echte scope van het verhaal: een inventaris en analyse van de sociale fenomenen die zich voordoen in de directe omgeving van iemand die zelfmoord pleegt: de geruchten, roddels, de overbezorgdheid, de zorg ook om bezoedeling en besmetting, de nieuwsgierigheid. Eugenides brengt het prachtig in beeld, en ontluisterend natuurlijk ook.En dan is er natuurlijk de weergaloze stijl. Erg filmisch-expressief, regelmatig met treffende beeldspraak, en af en toe ook huiveringwekkend in de klinische beschrijving van de dramatische gebeurtenissen. En nu we toch bezig zijn: een prijs voor de knapste openingszin in jaren. Eugenides is in dit debuut al meteen een meester. Ik kijk nu al uit naar de volgende werken van deze auteur!
    • 2/5
      From my Cannonball Read V review ...

      This novel is one of my sister’s favorites so I needed to check it out. While it isn’t one of mine, it isn’t bad. It was a pretty quick read, and definitely held my interest. I just had some issues with it.

      The title tells you what’s going to happen in the book. There’s no surprise, really, except in how the five sisters will all take their lives by the end of the book, but the first couple of pages make it clear that they do. As a plot device, that works in this instance.

      The first issue is the narrative structure – the book is told from a collective first person. The guys in town who attended school with the sisters provide all of the detail. The guys have names (well, some of them do), but the perspective is of them as a group. It’s an okay idea, but it definitely prevents anyone from taking personal responsibility for their perspective. They appear to be discussing the events years and years after they occurred, trying to figure it all out in their minds by piecing together evidence and interviews, but it’s sort of awkward.

      The second issue stems from the first, and that is that because the narrative comes from a group of men, all we learn about these women is how guys see them. How they may be idealized, or put on a pedestal, or judged by their male peers seems especially cruel given the subject matter. These women are apparently only coming alive to the reader because of how some men noticed them. That’s sad to me.

      Because of the above two issues I almost feel like I’m missing something. I’d love to talk about this book in a literature class to see if maybe the devices that bothered me just completely went over my head. But the further I get from the book the less I like it.
    • 1/5
      The narration is really good, but the story is not!
    • 4/5
      The story is told by this group of boy-men (they are men now I guess technically but they started it all when they were children and can't move past it) who spent their childhood obsessed with the Lisbon sisters (Cecilia, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, Therese). As the title suggests, the sisters begin committing suicide (though not all virgins, so whatchu on about, Eugenides?!) and the boys (yes, even the Internet is just like 'hey, they're just the neighborhood boys, don't worry about names') are trying to piece together the mystery that is the Lisbon girls.It's a really different take on a coming of age story and I have recommended it to a lot of my friends on that basis. I'm interested in seeing what else Eugenides has to offer.
    • 4/5
      Mixed feelings about this one. I loved the beginning of the book -- the first sentence completely draws the reader in. From there, you basically know how the novel ends, and spend the rest of the reading following the timeline of the Lisbon girls & trace the path that brought them to the end. However, if you are a reader wanting answers & waiting for some closure, you'll likely be disappointed. I found myself falling into this category. While the prose of the book is very compelling, I was waiting for a climax that ultimately fell short. And while I believe Eugenides meant for this to be more of a pondering, thought-provoking novel which truly does reflect all of the unanswered questions in a suicide, I was still left wanting more.
    • 5/5
      Second reading and I loved as much (or more) as I remember it. Haunting, beautiful, sad.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful book. Beautifully written in a narrative prose style.
    • 5/5
      This was my first book by Eugenides and one of the best books I've read all year. It was haunting and heartbreaking. Normally I get annoyed when I read a book that "tells" rather than "shows", but for once it was actually crucial to the story. The first person plural narration was brilliant. I felt like I was right there with the boys, peering out windows and watching the Lisbon girls, feeling at once captivated and mystified by them. There's one scene in particular (at a Homecoming dance) that made my chest ache, made me wish so badly that things would turn out differently than the inevitable outcome I had been told to expect from the very first page. No such luck. This book is a new favorite, and one that stays with you long after you finish reading it. I look forward to reading his other two.
    • 1/5
      I just couldn't get into this book. The movie either. It was too blahhhh for me.
    • 3/5
      It's very hard to figure out how I felt about this book. I read it practically all in one go (curled up in bed with it angled to the light, getting a headache from tiny text, with a hot water bottle under my feet!) and it's still sort of sinking in. It felt like I was meant to read it all in one go, since it had no chapter breaks.

      It felt rather... numb. Suicide normally touches me somewhere raw, but the suicides themselves seemed somehow ritualistic and the narrators, by not being startled, speaking from years later, added to that effect. It also feels inevitable: I wasn't reading in some kind of breathless anticipation, but rather with that sense of fate, inevitability, no surprises.

      The narration itself is an interesting choice. Lots of people are describing it as a 'Greek chorus'; I don't know if that was the author's intent. That comparison sort of works, anyway. It felt natural for the story, and appropriate for the collective connection they felt to the girls. It felt least natural when separate boys were differentiated, and I was oddly less interested in them and more interested in the collective.

      Interesting to read, anyway: the star rating may fluctuate as I absorb what I've been reading and figure out more thoughts on it!
    • 4/5
      Interesting to see how different Ms. Coppola's take was to the original material. The book's main theme is how mysterious adolescent females are to their male counterparts. Ms. Coppola's take was decidedly different.
    • 4/5
      Jeffrey Eugenides has a unique ability to bring out the comical in the most mundane events, especially in the way children think about the world. In the case of the Virgin Suicides, his topic is a poignant one, and yet he manages to excellently weave his usual humorous take on suburban America and childhood into the story without making it a comic novel. All of the characters are interesting, well-developed and likable in the literary sense. The Virgin Suicides is a great read, but is just an overture, preparation for, the masterpiece of his next novel, Middlesex.
    • 1/5
      Pretty boring. I don't know why I bothered to finish it.
    • 4/5
      When I read Joshua Ferris's "Then We Came To The End", I thought that his device of using a first person plural omniscient narrator was unusual, but it seems that Eugenides did it first. This book is a curious mixture of black comedy and elegiac nostalgia, as the narrators remember and reconstruct their 70s adolescence through the story of 5 sisters, their constrained lives and their eventual suicides. I can't say how I would have felt about this book if I hadn't read Middlesex, but for me it was less interesting, though still enjoyable and well written.
    • 5/5
      One of those books that comes along and changes your life.
    • 4/5
      I remember watching The Virgin Suicides when I was 11 and it had first come out on VHS (and DVD probably). My first thought when I finished the movie was "They all killed themselves? What a STUPID movie!" So, I decided to finally check out the book (and rewatch the movie). And I did like the book a bit more than I liked the movie, but then again, I wasn't really blown away. After rewatching the movie, I am led to believe that it is highly overrated. Pretty good flick? Yes. Wonderful, beautiful, masterpiece? Ehh no! In regards to the book version, it's sort of scary what can happen when you smother your kids. Seriously, the mom in The Virgin Suicides was a bit of a monster. I am a firm believer that kids need an opportunity to breathe. Helicopter moms always annoy me, but Mrs. Lisbon took it to a freaky level. Taking your kids out of school and giving them no means to contact anyone outside they're house is way extreme. I can understand why the girls killed themselves. I may not approve of it, but I understand it. Since The Virgin Suicides is narrated by Lisbon girls' next door neighbors, teenage boys who were vastly infatuated with the Lisbon girls, we're not given a direct road into their inner psyches. In fact, the Lisbon girls seem to be less individual entities than one whole group. Sometimes, it was hard to tell who was who. However, I'm thinking that was Eugenides intention. These boys didn't see Mary. Therese. Bonnie. Lux. Cecilia. But rather saw Mary, Therese, Bonnie, Lux, Cecilia AKA the Lisbon Girls. Due to this, the Lisbon girls remain a mystery. One thing that heavily annoyed me in The Virgin Suicides (besides the monster mom and the submissive dad) was that the narrator tended to go on tangents that had nothing to do with them or the Lisbon girls themselves. I kept thinking "and the point of mentioning that is?"; like things their neighbor's grandmother thought about life. I'm sorry, but what does that have to do with the Lisbon girls? So, I thought The Virgin Suicides was just okay. I would have liked to known more about the Lisbon girls themselves, even though I know it isn't possible for the boys to know that much about them. Interesting read and interesting movie, anyway.
    • 4/5
      I wanted to like this more.It was very well written - insert various burblings about the male gaze - however, I feel it suffered from a lack of grounding context. The story is recounted from this non-specific point in the future by this/these narrator/s, but there wasn't, for me, the reason for it. You've got this male gaze but I didn't feel it had the level of self-awareness there; it doesn't feel quite as deliberate as it could in either direction (ignorance is a great trick to pull).As a result, I felt the ending sputtered and fizzled out rather than drawing to a close. Lacking, but the rest of it was excellent.
    • 4/5
      If GG Marquez had written Arcade Fire's debut album. At times a bit try-hard, as if the readers would be bored if everyone didn't have an over-engineered cartoon quirk, but once you settle into the style it works. Possibly more effective if the ending hadn't been telegraphed from the start.
    • 3/5
      The Virgin Suicides is the third book I've read by Jeffrey Eugenides and quite possibly the one I liked the least. While I wanted to like it because I'd heard it was a "must read" it left me somewhat deflated. The story takes place in 1970's Detroit where five sisters commit suicide within a year of each other. After the youngest sister first has a failed attempt but then eventually succeeds the family becomes despondent and ultimately isolates themselves from the world. Told in the voice of the adoring neighborhood teenage boys the delivery feels awkward and perhaps that is the point. It was very frustrating for me not knowing the parents nor the sister's perspective other than what little was overheard, told to the boys or what they assumed. It the author wanted the reader to feel like someone on the outside looking in then he succeeded perfectly, however, this left me frustrated and unable to appreciate this book. This story left me wanting too much to be able to consider it a "good read". I would have liked to have had a perspective from each sister and the parents in order to get a truer sense of their thoughts. It was a very different and unique kind of story and for that I can give it three stars. This is also included book #10 in my Classics Club reading challenge as I found it on a "modern classics list". How I acquired this book: Half-price booksShelf Life: About a year and a half.