The Virgin Suicides (by Jeffrey Eugenides)
So fucking good.
I loved the movie, of course, but it had such a Sofia Coppola tone to it, I wasn't sure that the book would live up to it. Well, it turns out the book is equally great, if not even greater. It's just so melancholy and haunting and beautifully, beautifully, beautifully written. Love the conceit of the narrator being the neighborhood boys. Love the characterizations and the depiction of adolescence. Love the meditative nature of the prose. The best book I've read so far this year.
"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
I loved the movie, of course, but it had such a Sofia Coppola tone to it, I wasn't sure that the book would live up to it. Well, it turns out the book is equally great, if not even greater. It's just so melancholy and haunting and beautifully, beautifully, beautifully written. Love the conceit of the narrator being the neighborhood boys. Love the characterizations and the depiction of adolescence. Love the meditative nature of the prose. The best book I've read so far this year.
"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
posted by mo pie at 11:18 AM
2 Comments:
Oh, thank you so much for loving this book. I loved it when I read it, but then afterward I felt like it didn't get very much respect, and wondered if maybe it wasn't as good as I remembered. I definitely liked it better than Middlesex.
Who are these people who don't love it? Man. It's so amazing.
I haven't read Middlesex, but I also liked The Marriage Plot, so maybe I just like Eugenides in general. I'll give Middlesex a shot for sure.
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