Book Review July

It may be late and it may heavy but I promised and I hope I haven't disappointed.

This months book review revisits one of my favourites and a book that over the past few years has been there through difficult times and easy; it is a story that does not exactly tell you anything but leaves footprints of speculation in my mind. 

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is a baffling and deeply moving novel that has become a part of me since I first saw the book cover online. Perhaps the most striking part of reading this book for me was how, which I clearly see now, was that it was the book which transitioned me from girl into young adult and from stories to literature. Albeit before, yes, I had read works of classical literature, but with a high consideration of confusion...this book however I clicked onto like a light switch in my brain had decided I was allowed to see. 

The Virgin Suicides is a collection of thoughts and mentioned artefacts accumulated by a group of boys, now men, in remembrance of five sisters in their neighbourhood. These five sisters become fixations throughout the book of a time when these men were young and innocently traipsing through their teenage years. It is the obsession with girls who never reached older than seventeen that marked growth in the boys, they learning the reality of the world while the girls remained inside their own utopia which speedily turned dark and destructive. 

Though not entirely explanatory and revelatory Eugenides feeds snippets of information about the sisters to readers through anecdotes, interviews, preserved items from the girls. It is the piecing together of information that engages the reader, encouraging them to solve a question the narrators of the novel did not directly ask: Why did the Lisbon girls kill themselves? And almost infuriatingly, but also fittingly, neither narrators nor readers truly answer that question. It is a book which leaves more to the imagination than it provides; but, in my opinion, that is what draws me to the book time and time again, hoping that at some point in my life the answers will be there. Those answers will be from my experience, Eugenides merely prompting me to realise them. 

The topic of the narrator's obsession, the Lisbon girls themselves, represent many of literature's great themes. Celia, in a haunting silence and white wedding dress so easily likened to the great gothic Miss Havisham brings innocence to the gothic tradition like never before. Lux, in her rebellion, her confidence and her enchantment is modern feminism and existentialism wrapped inside the twisted stereotype of the fictitious teenage girl. As sisters they represent the lengths to which human emotion will push you, how far love and loyalty can keep you together. And in the name itself, The Virgin Suicides, the irony of innocence these sisters so clearly never possessed, emphasises that this story is one not of tragic premature death but of an insight to the determination and calculated minds of the teenage psychology.

Eugenides, like I have been told he does in his other novels, pushes the boundaries of what he should explore as an author. Creeping towards reality rather than away from it his plot lines and characters bind themselves to readers, following you throughout your life and joining you in experiences not dissimilar to their fictitious lives.