THE VIRGIN SUICIDES PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

Jeffrey Eugenides | 260 pages | 20 Jun 2013 | HarperCollins Publishers | 9780007524303 | English | London, United Kingdom The Virgin Suicides by

Their mother Kathleen Turner is a hysteric so rattled by her daughters' blooming sexuality that she adds cloth to their prom dresses until they appear in "four identical sacks. These parents look gruesome to us. All parents look gruesome to kids, and all of their attempts at discipline seem unreasonable. The teenage years of the Lisbon girls are no better or worse than most teenage years. This is not the story of daughters driven to their deaths. The story it most reminds me of, indeed, is " Picnic at Hanging Rock " , about a party of young girls, not unlike the Lisbon sisters in appearance and sexual experience, who go for a school outing one day and disappear into the wilderness, never to be seen again. Were they captured? Killed in a fall? Trapped somehow? Bitten by snakes? Simply lost in the maze of nature? What happened to them is not the point. Their disappearance is the point. One moment they were smiling and bowing in their white dresses in the sun, and the next they were gone forever. The lack of any explanation is the whole point: For those left behind, they are preserved forever in the perfection they possessed when they were last seen. She has the courage to play it in a minor key. She doesn't hammer home ideas and interpretations. She is content with the air of mystery and loss that hangs in the air like bitter poignancy. Tolstoy said all happy families are the same. Yes, but he should have added, there are hardly any happy families. To live in a family group with walls around it is unnatural for a species that evolved in tribes and villages. What would work itself out in the give-and-take of a community gets grotesque when allowed to fester in the hothouse of a single-family home. A mild-mannered teacher and a strong-willed woman turn into a paralyzed captive and a harridan. Their daughters see themselves as captives of these parents, who hysterically project their own failure upon the children. The worship the girls receive from the neighborhood boys confuses them: If they are perfect, why are they seen as such flawed and dangerous creatures? And then the reality of sex, too young, peels back the innocent idealism and reveals its secret engine, which is animal and brutal, lustful and contemptuous. In a way, the Lisbon girls and the neighborhood boys never existed, except in their own adolescent imaginations. They were imaginary creatures, waiting for the dream to end through death or adulthood. We see her talking to a psychiatrist after she tries to slash her wrists. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Kathleen Turner as Mrs. as Mr. as Lux Lisbon. The thing I liked the most about this book is the perspective. We're learning about 5 girls who commit suicide.. It was genius. The way this book was written is brilliant. Honestly, every couple of pages I would think to myself "When I don't even really know what to say. Honestly, every couple of pages I would think to myself "When Jeffrey Eugenides thought to himself that he should write this from the outside view he had one of the best epiphanies ever. This book is just so true, so pure. It isn't false in anyway, it states it how it is: sad and depressing and demoralizing and harsh and upsetting. But true. Why didn't I love this book? I don't know. I honestly, I don't know. There was something missing. Maybe it was my disconnect from the story, maybe it was my lack of real care for any of the events or characters, or maybe it was the lack of plot. When I'm true to myself, I could act like this was the best book, I could write and essay about how life altering this book is, but it's a lie. Maybe for other people it is that, but for me it wasn't. Sometimes, you just don't connect to a book, and I didn't. Jun 04, Fabian rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Depressed people who complain about apathetic parents. Wow, you knew that this guy was the real deal after all. I see this as a perfect segue to his masterpiece "". It's simple, it's sad, it is capital I Intriguing. The first novel always announces the author's intentions for those that come next, and Eugenides loves the themes of adolescence in all its tragic shortcomings. The Lisbon girls are monoliths to the nameless suitors who do nothing else but speculate about them and become passionate voyeurs. They do nothing to save them; they only Wow, you knew that this guy was the real deal after all. They do nothing to save them; they only observe and obsess. I guess while girls become emblematic of sexual repression, the foolish boys become symbols of generic apathy and cowardice. It's a symbol of the times; a portrait of true suburban un-happiness. View 1 comment. Mar 12, K. Shelves: core. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Since the story is about 5 teenage sisters and the narrators were interested on them, readers presumed that they were narrating from the viewpoint of schoolboys with raging hormones and think of sex almost every hour of the day. Until the last sentence when Eugenides revealed that the narrators are already middle-age men with thinning hair and soft bellies. My perception of the story as a reader made a complete turnaround. The collective voice of the narrators who are voyeurs of the Lisbon family oozes with innocence of being young and sexually curious and guilt of being voyeurs who did not do anything to save the sisters. If you read this novel in a superficial manner, this is just about 5 young sisters year-old Cecilia , year-old Lux , year-old Bonnie , year-old Mary , and year-old Therese who killed themselves because of their very strict mother and workaholic submissive effeminate father. They probably lost all hopes of having a good future like finishing school after they were pulled out just because Lux missed the curfew or finding a rich man to marry since they were not allowed to go out anymore. But Eugenides, having an M. It would have been too simple for a story to be all about that. The boys thought that they were innocent but the fact that they were watching the Lisbon house through their binoculars, they were communicating with them via songs played on the telephone, the girls were leaving notes posted on the bicycle wheels or in the mailboxes did not give them the inkling to help to prevent the eventual group suicides. They just watched and did nothing. In effect, the boys were the selfish ones and the guilt that permeates in them in their middle-age is what Eugenides, in my opinion, wants to communicate with this novel. Forewarned the people of small town of GrossPointe, Michigan. Some paid attention: the priest, the social worker. But in the end those were just not enough. The Lisbon sisters committed suicide with the blood left on the hands of the boys and the whole town. And the creepiest thing there is that since Eugenides used "we" and "us" and realizing in the end that those narrators were not teenage kids but were middle-age men, gave me the feeling that I, now a middle-age man myself, was with them watching Lux making out with faceless boys and men on the rooftop making me equally guilty. For me, this is a sample of a novel that seems to be a simple story but very rich in terms of interpretation. It just made me think of my role as a father to my teenage daughter. How I should deal with her especially during those times when we misunderstand each other, she locks herself in her room and cry. Fatherhood is trial and error and they say that one has to only follow his heart and everything will turn out right in the end. I wish it is that simple. Not that our family has the suicidal gene running in our blood but I just have to more sensitive and not bury myself in my office work and books and hope that times like that will go away once she's 20 and no longer an adolescent. One hell of a writer. View all 54 comments. Nov 17, F rated it did not like it Shelves: seen-movie , , usa. So disappointed with this book. Couldnt get my head round the characters. Apr 10, Charlotte May rated it liked it Shelves: classics , sisters , contemporary-recent. I finally ordered it from the library and gave it a go. It was ok. Rather odd at times, and not the most riveting of reads, but ok nonetheless. Set around the s I think? The sisters live in a claustrophobic household, full of strict rules laid down by their mother. Within the space of 2 years all 5 girls are dead - by suicide. Told from the perspective of 4 teen 3. Told from the perspective of 4 teenage boys who become infatuated with the girls, they follow their lives, and take them on the only date the girls will ever go on. I don't really have a lot to say about this book, it was very sad, we never really find out the reasons for their suicides, and the entire tale kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. View all 15 comments. I couldn't put this book down. It's not very long, and I'd been meaning to read it for years after hearing some great things about it. So I managed to get through it in a couple flights I took this week. It's utterly captivating; Eugenides's use of the choral narrative voice was unlike anything I've read before and the descriptions and dreamy and compelling. It has its moments of melodrama but those are balanced by the utterly mundane aspects of these characters' lives too. I feel like I need to I couldn't put this book down. I feel like I need to read it again to pick up on so many elements I may have overlooked or not fully appreciated the first time around. I can definitely see myself reading this one again and am glad to have finally gotten around to it. View 2 comments. I struggled with this book. On several levels. This narrative is told through the point of view of the boys around the girls. It purposefully fetishizes the pain and trauma of the five, attempting to critique this same fetishization. We barely know the tragedy of Cecilia I struggled with this book. We barely know the tragedy of Cecilia, but she herself is almost erased by the male narrators, who make her death into a case they can solve via the exhibits. They treat her death as true crime, not a true tragedy, and thus fail to solve any mystery at all. They must learn to see the girls as actual human beings. This critique works, to some extent; it is the sisters themselves where the book falls apart. The five suicidal virgin sisters are, despite incidental moments of characterization, a monolith; they are used as representations of some deeper societal problem, rather than people. They are at once sexualized and devoid of sexuality; their deaths are fetishized to such a degree by the lead group of boys that they cease to exist at all. In other words, the five sisters are at once given agency, and then have their agency taken away by a narrative that refuses them any room to tell their own stories. I believe the authorial intent here may have been the former; the result, to me, is the latter. This is not an uncommon problem in media; I actually read this for a class on concepts of adolescence in which we also watched Rebel Without a Cause , and yep, the father in that is overly feminine, too. There is some good here; a discussion on the ways teachers attempt to deal with the suicide is well-done, and a scene in which the Reverend equates suicide with not winning title game is both hilarious and deeply sad. The imagery around the decay of the house is compelling. I also want to acknowledge that this was a good deal more revolutionary when it was written in Blog Goodreads Twitter Instagram Youtube View all 7 comments. So much better the second time around and I loved it the first, so Gorgeous, creepy. A suburban mythology. At first, I couldn't shake images from the film, which I thought might detract from really appreciating it as a novel, but in the end it didn't. I think that's because I realized had done a remarkable job adapting the text. I mean, holy shit, it's pretty much perfect. Such a moody novel with sparse dialogue, but what is there, is so right on and often funny So So much better the second time around and I loved it the first, so Something that I very much loved about the book and that lacks from the film , are the moments when the boys realize not only that the Lisbon girls are unique entities, but that they're not perfect. One's even described as "horsey". I love that. I love it when people fall in love with real people. People with big foreheads, or big noses. People with crowded smiles. I love the narrator. Worringly obsessed especially considering the time that's passed though he may be, it really feels like someone is telling you something true. It's the kind of story you would tell for decades had you lived to see it, and I like to think it actually happened in a town not far from where I grew up, years before I was born, a story I'd hear from locals, never quite sure how much of it was true, and how much had become local legend. View all 8 comments. Influenced by a chance conversation with a babysitter, who told him how as teenagers she and her sisters all attempted to take their own lives, Eugenides has fashioned an eccentric, often amusing, and dreamy American fantasy, set within the leafy suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a place where he spent his own years growing up. Having ignored other reviews, and going into this knowing absolutely nothing, my concerns this was going to be a rather dark affair were quickly brushed aside, as it's a Influenced by a chance conversation with a babysitter, who told him how as teenagers she and her sisters all attempted to take their own lives, Eugenides has fashioned an eccentric, often amusing, and dreamy American fantasy, set within the leafy suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a place where he spent his own years growing up. Having ignored other reviews, and going into this knowing absolutely nothing, my concerns this was going to be a rather dark affair were quickly brushed aside, as it's a time where some of us get the January blues the last thing I wanted was to be wallowing in the pits of despair reading a novel about suicide. Thankfully, Eugenides doesn't focus so much on suicide, but more along the lines of unrequited love, whilst also having an assured heartfelt nostalgia pumping through his veins. Like suburban archaeologists, the narrators a group of middle-aged men piece together memories from twenty years previous, and their fixation with five sisters. And it's like mentally ploughing through a rubbish tip of evidence - diaries, snapshots, dried-out cosmetics, sanitary towels, soap dishes. Anything to help better understand the sisters, of whom they didn't really properly know. Searching for some sort of explanation as to 'why' what happened, happened. They interview former neighbours, friends, teachers, dazed and divorced parents coasting through life, they collate gossip, but, still the answers to questions remain an enigma. All this is described in a tone that is both elegiac and comic. The five sisters - Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia remain a mystery throughout, one thing we do know is that they live sheltered lives under the thumb of their tyrannical, disturbed mother, and the sympathetic but docile father, who is a maths teacher. In an ordinary suburban world of lawnmowers and barbecues, the girls somehow represent the extraordinary, as well as the odd, the inexplicable, and the romantically extreme. There were pondering thoughts of - why the girls don't rebel?. Why don't they reach out to friends, or run away from home? Why don't the authorities insist that they go to school? What has driven their mother to impose such a strict regime in the first place? Such obvious thoughts are never addressed by Eugenides, and his willful ignoring of these issues can grate on the reader's nerves, momentarily breaking the spell of his tale. Although his powers of observation are startling and acute, in small pockets, I found the narrative, and I hate to say this, a bit of a chore. As debut novels go, Eugenides does write with a swaggering confidence, not like a literary virgin, making this seem like it was his tenth novel and not his first. The Virgin Suicides cleverly fakes being a book about teen suicide, as its real exploration is into the delicate dynamics that keep a family together. One striking aspect of the novel that didn't occur until later is that it relies entirely on the male gaze. Unfortunately for me, the narrators appear in an overly romantic deluded way. Not soppy or cheezy, just a little too exaggerated and goofy. One thing I can't fault is its creatively original nature. But I would still be surprised if it lingers around in my thoughts for more than a day. View all 10 comments. Jun 28, David Schaafsma rated it it was amazing Shelves: fictionth-century , best-books-ever. Maybe a regrettable topic in this time of severe mental health challenges within the isolation and other madnesses of Covid Original review: As I approach the El every day the first thing that greets me is the suicide hotline posters. I grew up in the sixties and in the seventies I worked a suicide hotline, I worked in a psych hospital where I recall as vividly as five minutes ago several suicide attempts, and some completions. Family members, too. You never quite get over it, all the emotions, rage, sorrow, the mystification. I had three sisters, and I lived in this girl-centric home, slumber parties, make-up, frizzy combs, lotions, girl books and whispers, and I never even dated until my senior year in high school. Girls were a mystery to me and I was stymied about how to approach them, I on Mars, they on Venus. I thought then and think now that it is one of the great novels. It features a narrator with a first person plural pronoun, a group of boys obsessed with a group of five sisters, in Grosse Point, north of Detroit, in the mid sixties; its ending is given away in the first sentence. Or in the title, actually, so the question is not so much what happened but why, and the answers the boys, now men, come up with are not definitive. In this case, a group of boys are curious about the natures of five girls who are cooped up in a house primarily by their mother. Why are they what they seem to be? Can they know them? The short answer is no. This question of why is also relevant in this book to those who commit suicide. Well, you get to decide, but Eugenides will not make it easy for you. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The two other bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty. We—that collective male we--thought of that as sadly hilarious. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly. Dutch Elm Disease, fish flies, the rich smells of decay are everywhere even as the girls are largely confined indoors. The girls seem from the beginning like ghosts. And it was an exhilarating trip down sixties memory lane for me. With some wonderful writing. View all 13 comments. Published in , his debut is a literary narcotic that may thrill or disinterest readers based on their level of dependency to words. I found it to be a mindless drug that took me into a world where electrifying imagination and intoxicating prose mingle with some of the most obnoxious and far-fetched melodrama I've encountered in a book. In a fictional world where anything can The Virgin Suicides is the first novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, who'd win a Pulitzer Prize for his follow-up Middlesex. In a fictional world where anything can happen, nothing there makes any real difference, making it difficult for me to care about the book even while it was often thrilling me. Set in the s in a suburb of Detroit, the novel is the first person account of an unnamed narrator who seems to have been a teenage boy once, and who like many of his friends, is obsessed with the secrets of the enigmatic Lisbon girls, five aloof sisters who we're told very early on, in case the title didn't spoil it, take their own lives. Cecilia 13 , Lux 14 , Bonnie 15 , Mary 16 and Therese 17 are revealed from afar, either through windows or in corners at school, or from accounts those close to them reveal to the narrator over the years. It all starts when Cecilia opens her wrist in the bathtub and is rushed to the hospital. Paramedics find Cecilia clutching a laminated photo of the Virgin Mary. While her mother, an antisocial Protestant, and her father, an enthusiastic high school math teacher, offer no clues, the popular theory to Cecilia's suicide attempt blames a teenager named Dominic Palazzolo, a Catholic who lovesick over an unrequited love and pissed off at the Holy Mother, leaps off a roof in an act of desperation. Cecilia witnesses this, along with the narrator and his friends, who are incredulous when upon Cecilia's return, they receive party invitations from the Lisbon girls. Only one of their peers, a boy named Peter Sissen, has seen the inside of the home before. Then the night arrived. In blue blazers, with khaki trousers and clip-on neckties, we walked along the sidewalk in front of the Lisbon house as we had so many times before, but this time we turned up the walk, and climbed the front steps between the pots of red geraniums, and rang the doorbell. Peter Sissen acted as our leader, and even looked slightly bored, saying again and again, "Wait'll you see this. Above us, the face of Mrs. Lisbon took form in the dimness. She told us to come in, we bumped against each other getting through the doorway, and as soon as we set foot on the hooked rug in the foyer we saw that Peter Sissen's descriptions of the house had been all wrong. Instead of a heady atmosphere of feminine chaos, we found the house to be a tidy, dry-looking place that smelled faintly of stale popcorn. A piece of needle-point saying "Bless This Home" was framed over the arch, and to the right, on a shelf above the radiator, five pairs of bronzed baby shoes preserved for all time the unstimulating stage of the Lisbon girls' infancy. The dining room was full of stark colonial furniture. One wall had a painting of Pilgrims plucking a turkey. The living room revealed orange carpeting and a brown vinyl sofa. Lisbon's La-Z-Boy flanked a small table on which sat the partially completed model of a sailing ship, without rigging and with the busty mermaid on the prow painted over. Cecilia remains withdrawn during the basement party and asking her mother to be dismissed, goes upstairs, where she throws herself from her window and onto the iron spikes of the fence below. She leaves no note and her diary, which ends up in the hands of the narrator, offers no clues as to why she'd kill herself. Cecilia has a funeral, but due to a funeral workers' strike, her body is kept chilled at the mortuary. The obsession the narrator and his friends share for the surviving Lisbon girls only intensifies. Mr Lisbon exhibits strange behavior, talking to the spider plants at school and refusing to open up to the priest or his fellow teachers. Their hope in cracking the mysteries of the Lisbon girls comes in Trip Fontaine, an unlikely Lothario lusted after by girls who eagerly come over to help him cram for exams and their mothers, who shamelessly offer Trip baked goods. While Trip keeps intimate details of his sexual triumphs confidential, or possibly forgets them in a haze of marijuana, he is smitten when he stumbles into the wrong history class and encounters Lux Lisbon. Determined to ask her out, Trip walks into Mr. Lisbon's class and asks her father for permission to take Lux to Homecoming, offering to have three of his friends accompany the remaining Lisbon girls to the dance as well. Trip utilizes diplomacy to select his three wing-men and the quadruple date goes off much better than expected for all involved, until Lux disappears with Trip and stays out two and a half hours past her 11 o'clock curfew. Lisbon initiates a crackdown that results in all four schools being pulled from school, in order to "grieve" for their sister in peace. Lux is observed by the narrator copulating with boys on her roof. She fakes a burst appendix to be rushed to the hospital, where Lux asks the doctor for a pregnancy test. One medical opinion holds the Lisbon girls are acting out grief over their dead sister by mimicking her tragic behavior. As it circulated in the next few months, this theory convinced many people because it simplified things. Already Cecilia's suicide had assumed in retrospect the stature of a long-prophesied event. Nobody thought it shocking anymore, and accepting it as First Cause removed any need for further explanation. As Mr. Hutch put it, "They made Cecilia out to be the bad guy. In the bathtub, cooking in the broth of her own blood, Cecilia had released an airborne virus which the other girls, even in coming to save her, had contracted. No one cared how Cecilia had caught the virus in the first place. Transmission became explanation. The other girls, safe in their own rooms, had smelled something strange, sniffed the air, but ignored it. Black tendrils of smoke had crept under their doors, rising up behind their studious backs to form the evil shapes smoke or shadow take on in cartoons: a black-hatted assassin brandishing a dagger; an anvil about to drop. Contagious suicide made it palpable. Spiky bacteria lodged in the agar of the girls' throats. In the morning, a soft oral thrush had sprouted over their tonsils. The girls felt sluggish. At the window the world's light seemed dimmed. They rubbed their eyes to no avail. They felt heavy, slow-witted. Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason. When we thought of the girls along these lines, it was feverish creatures, exhaling soupy breath, succumbing day by day in their isolated ward. We went outside with our hair wet in the hopes of catching flu ourselves so that we might share their delirium. It takes place in an American suburb that resembles a real one, the way impressively but hastily constructed facades on a film location resemble a wild west town if you aren't really paying close attention. In this world, a teenage narrator with no name and seemingly no life of his own fills hour upon hour spying on the Lisbons, who seem to oblige by walking in front of windows a lot. Lux obliges him and others by having sex on top of her roof. Eugenides records it all in dizzying prose that is amazingly detailed, often acidic and sometimes baffling. In fact, despite her convulsions she was clutching her stomach , Lux had dared to put on a coat of the forbidden pink lipstick that tasted--so the boys on the roof told us--like strawberries. Woody Clabault's sister had the same brand, and once, after we got into his parents' liquor cabinet, we made him put on the lipstick and kiss each one of us that we, too, would know what it tasted like. Beyond the flavor of the drinks we improvised that night--part ginger ale, part bourbon, part lime juice, part scotch--we could taste the strawberry wax on Woody Clabault's lips, transforming them, before the artificial fireplace, into Lux's own. blared from the tape player; we threw ourselves about in chairs, bodilessly floating to the couch from time to time to dip our heads into the strawberry vat, but the next day we refused to remember that any of this had happened, and even now it's the first time we've spoken of it. At any rate, the memory of that night was superseded by that of Lux's being hoisted into the EMS truck, because, despite discrepancies of times and space, it was Lux's lips we tasted, not Clabault's. Teenagers don't behave like this, share information like this or surround themselves with nearly as much drama as this, with not only one suicide, but five in one house. Eugenides is on solid ground with Trip Fontaine, a terrific character who electrifies the book. This was also the case with the film adaptation, the feature directing debut of Sofia Coppola that featured Josh Hartnett as Trip. Trip's engineering of a quadruple date with four sisters who've lost a sibling could've been the heart of a coherent novel, a subtle one, with his character narrating a story that hued closer to reality. This one is a wild kingdom that while impressive, needed more work in the editing stage than it got. Shelves: best-of-the-best , favorites , literary-fiction. Sometimes, you just know when you have found a truly great novelist and Jeffrey Eugenides is one such novelist. I initially rated this book four stars but no, it deserves a five star rating. And where have I been since ? On some desert island? How did I not possibly know of this wonderful gem of a book? Mr Eugenides has shot onto my favourite author list and I've ordered Middlesex and The Marriage Plot from my bookseller. This is a haunting, dreamlike, atmospheric and raw novel. Told from t Sometimes, you just know when you have found a truly great novelist and Jeffrey Eugenides is one such novelist. Told from the viewpoint of five men now in their thirties. They recount one year some twenty years earlier and the obsession they had with a family of girls; an obsession which haunts them even in their adult years. It begins with the suicide of the youngest girl; the precursor to the preoccupation the boys have with the Lisbon sisters. This is a tale of the atrophy of the Lisbon family; the gradual breakdown of their tenuous lives over the course of 13 months. And it's basically neighbourhood story; Michigan in the 's, one street, one year, five girls and the neighbouring boys. The story is told interestingly in plural first person narration by the boys. The sisters are a mystery to the boys then and still some twenty years later where the memory still haunts them. The girls actually remain a bit of a mystery to the reader partly because you never actually hear from their viewpoint. They appear wraith-like and mystical to both reader and narrators. Cecilia, Bonnie, Mary, Therese and Lux have lived cloistered lives. Although they attend the same school as the boys, they keep to themselves; appear unusual and different from the other pupils. The boys have almost a reverent need to know; it seems driven by a pure want to be close to the girls. They start collecting what will be an extensive cache of what they term as exhibits including Cecilia's journal, a faded polariod, Lux's bra and Bonnie's votive candles. Insights other than the boys' own are recounted as the narrators later seek out various neighbours, other pupils, parents and teachers. Although, as they discover, this knowledge will do little to uncover the riddle of the elusive Lisbon girls. The book is light on dialogue and rich with description; delicious detail, detail, detail. Eugenides creates an ethereal, persistent, intriguing mood. It is surrealistic and lingers with you long after you have put the book down. View all 4 comments. Theresa, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia Lisbon are five Catholic sisters growing up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Michigan during the s. Their local community appears spellbound with the blond, elegant Lisbon sisters, who seem forbidden and separate from the ordinary world around them. Inexplicable tragedy strikes as the youngest Lisbon girl, Cecilia, commits suicide at the age of thirteen. This tragic event is the downward spiral that eventually destroys Cecilia's four sisters wi Theresa, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia Lisbon are five Catholic sisters growing up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Michigan during the s. This tragic event is the downward spiral that eventually destroys Cecilia's four sisters within two years of her death. Narrated in a group voice of fascinated neighborhood boys, the girls last year and a half of life are obsessively observed. Every glimpse of a Lisbon girl through a window and every piece of trash from their house is examined minutely as the boys try to unravel the shocking mystery of the Lisbon girls life and ultimately their deaths. The Virgin Suicides is a novel that is engrossing. It exemplifies the truth that often in life there's no reason for why tragedy occurs, and no matter how hard one tries to find an explanation, sometimes there isn't one that can be found. June I've lost track of how many times I've read this. This time I listened to the audiobook and I freaking loved it! There's a reason why this is my favourite book. The story is tragic and sad but so beautiful. I love the writing and the narration. I have never re-read a book this many times and I still wanna re-read it. I managed to catch some m June I've lost track of how many times I've read this. I managed to catch some more things I didn't catch before. The characters in this book are so well developed. This book has so much depth to it and I love it to pieces. It's such a powerful book full of grief and sorrow. It's incredible sad, mystical in ways, also with an interesting narrative. The five Lisbon daughters all commit suicide, and we follow some boys who live across the street that watch them and obsess with there lives. For the daughters, first we have Cecilia, who is the youngest child. She is 13 years old and the first to go, she is known as the odd sibling. Her suicide takes the town and her families lives for a huge turn. We also have Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Therese. All of the daughters are and there teens and live with extremely strict parents. There very religious, not aloud to where clothes that show to much skin, not aloud to date, not aloud to go to parities or dances, and barley they are barley aloud to leave the house. Can you just imagine a strict home, and the youngest daughter kills themselves? Like all the repercussions this has on the family and the whole town. The boys who narrate give a very interesting insight. The Virgin Suicides (film) - Wikipedia

Crazy Credits. Alternate Versions. Rate This. A group of male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents in suburban Detroit in the mid s. Director: Sofia Coppola. Writers: Jeffrey Eugenides novel , Sofia Coppola. Available on Amazon. Added to Watchlist. From metacritic. Our Favorite '90s Movie Soundtracks. Favourite Movies. Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. What are you doing? Edit Cast Cast overview, first billed only: James Woods Lisbon Kathleen Turner Lisbon Kirsten Dunst Lux Lisbon Josh Hartnett Father Moody Danny DeVito Horniker A. Mary Lisbon Hanna Hall Cecilia Lisbon Leslie Hayman Therese Lisbon Chelse Swain Bonnie Lisbon Anthony DeSimone David Barker Robert Schwartzman Paul Baldino FourTee A Guide to the Films of Sofia Coppola. Edit Storyline A man about forty years of age tells the story from when he was a teenager in upscale suburban Detroit of his and three of his friends' fascination with the mysterious and doomed Lisbon sisters. Taglines: Beautiful, mysterious, haunting, invariably fatal. Just like life. Edit Did You Know? Sofia then directed Ms. The narrators are both elegiac and mordant, dipping in and out of lives, moments, acting as the collective consciousness of an entire neighborhood. Even as they become specific, studied, obsessed over, the Lisbon girls are never truly revealed, to either the reader or to the boys, who understand that their interest in the girls never gets them any closer to the truth of who the girls are. If anything, the girls become more mysterious, more powerful, forever out of reach. 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. As a writer, Jeffrey Eugenides builds a world so tight and atmospheric that the book operates like a weather system, with its own distinct logic, or like the closed circuit of an adolescent brain, attuned to signs and symbols, an addictive claustrophobia. Why do these details—spiked pineapple juice, rosy-pink marble, a dirty canvas tennis shoe—conjure so much? For the narrators, all this scrupulous attention to detail seems like an attempt at moral irreproachability, an effort to defend their authority to tell the tale of the Lisbon girls. By being unsparing in their trawl through the past, they can forestall charges of narrative agenda or impropriety, as if pure quantity of information could stand in for the truth. Even as these details accumulate—data drawn from every conceivable corner of the neighborhood, every nook of memory—they obscure the larger picture. Only later does it occur to them that the message the girls were sending might not have needed decoding, that all their conspiracy theories and painstaking efforts to crack the supposed code only obscured reality. Maybe the girls had merely wanted connection. Their parents—no longer in possession of the moral authority that war confers—have to prove themselves on the meager battlefields of their suburban homes instead, a generalized fear replacing any specific enemy. The source of the possible danger shifts in scope from the global—the threat of nuclear annihilation, pollution, toxic spills—to the local: dead flies crusting over the cars in the neighborhood, trees on the block condemned because of Dutch elm disease. Danger or, rather, death is something external and knowable, and therefore is something that can be prevented—the boys get vaccinations, hold polio sugar cubes under their tongues, caution Cecilia not to touch her mouth to the drinking fountain. At any rate, the memory of that night was superseded by that of Lux's being hoisted into the EMS truck, because, despite discrepancies of times and space, it was Lux's lips we tasted, not Clabault's. Teenagers don't behave like this, share information like this or surround themselves with nearly as much drama as this, with not only one suicide, but five in one house. Eugenides is on solid ground with Trip Fontaine, a terrific character who electrifies the book. This was also the case with the film adaptation, the feature directing debut of Sofia Coppola that featured Josh Hartnett as Trip. Trip's engineering of a quadruple date with four sisters who've lost a sibling could've been the heart of a coherent novel, a subtle one, with his character narrating a story that hued closer to reality. This one is a wild kingdom that while impressive, needed more work in the editing stage than it got. Shelves: best-of-the-best , favorites , literary- fiction. Sometimes, you just know when you have found a truly great novelist and Jeffrey Eugenides is one such novelist. I initially rated this book four stars but no, it deserves a five star rating. And where have I been since ? On some desert island? How did I not possibly know of this wonderful gem of a book? Mr Eugenides has shot onto my favourite author list and I've ordered Middlesex and The Marriage Plot from my bookseller. This is a haunting, dreamlike, atmospheric and raw novel. Told from t Sometimes, you just know when you have found a truly great novelist and Jeffrey Eugenides is one such novelist. Told from the viewpoint of five men now in their thirties. They recount one year some twenty years earlier and the obsession they had with a family of girls; an obsession which haunts them even in their adult years. It begins with the suicide of the youngest girl; the precursor to the preoccupation the boys have with the Lisbon sisters. This is a tale of the atrophy of the Lisbon family; the gradual breakdown of their tenuous lives over the course of 13 months. And it's basically neighbourhood story; Michigan in the 's, one street, one year, five girls and the neighbouring boys. The story is told interestingly in plural first person narration by the boys. The sisters are a mystery to the boys then and still some twenty years later where the memory still haunts them. The girls actually remain a bit of a mystery to the reader partly because you never actually hear from their viewpoint. They appear wraith-like and mystical to both reader and narrators. Cecilia, Bonnie, Mary, Therese and Lux have lived cloistered lives. Although they attend the same school as the boys, they keep to themselves; appear unusual and different from the other pupils. The boys have almost a reverent need to know; it seems driven by a pure want to be close to the girls. They start collecting what will be an extensive cache of what they term as exhibits including Cecilia's journal, a faded polariod, Lux's bra and Bonnie's votive candles. Insights other than the boys' own are recounted as the narrators later seek out various neighbours, other pupils, parents and teachers. Although, as they discover, this knowledge will do little to uncover the riddle of the elusive Lisbon girls. The book is light on dialogue and rich with description; delicious detail, detail, detail. Eugenides creates an ethereal, persistent, intriguing mood. It is surrealistic and lingers with you long after you have put the book down. View all 4 comments. Theresa, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia Lisbon are five Catholic sisters growing up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Michigan during the s. Their local community appears spellbound with the blond, elegant Lisbon sisters, who seem forbidden and separate from the ordinary world around them. Inexplicable tragedy strikes as the youngest Lisbon girl, Cecilia, commits suicide at the age of thirteen. This tragic event is the downward spiral that eventually destroys Cecilia's four sisters wi Theresa, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia Lisbon are five Catholic sisters growing up in an upper- middle-class neighborhood in Michigan during the s. This tragic event is the downward spiral that eventually destroys Cecilia's four sisters within two years of her death. Narrated in a group voice of fascinated neighborhood boys, the girls last year and a half of life are obsessively observed. Every glimpse of a Lisbon girl through a window and every piece of trash from their house is examined minutely as the boys try to unravel the shocking mystery of the Lisbon girls life and ultimately their deaths. The Virgin Suicides is a novel that is engrossing. It exemplifies the truth that often in life there's no reason for why tragedy occurs, and no matter how hard one tries to find an explanation, sometimes there isn't one that can be found. June I've lost track of how many times I've read this. This time I listened to the audiobook and I freaking loved it! There's a reason why this is my favourite book. The story is tragic and sad but so beautiful. I love the writing and the narration. I have never re-read a book this many times and I still wanna re-read it. I managed to catch some m June I've lost track of how many times I've read this. I managed to catch some more things I didn't catch before. The characters in this book are so well developed. This book has so much depth to it and I love it to pieces. It's such a powerful book full of grief and sorrow. It's incredible sad, mystical in ways, also with an interesting narrative. The five Lisbon daughters all commit suicide, and we follow some boys who live across the street that watch them and obsess with there lives. For the daughters, first we have Cecilia, who is the youngest child. She is 13 years old and the first to go, she is known as the odd sibling. Her suicide takes the town and her families lives for a huge turn. We also have Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Therese. All of the daughters are and there teens and live with extremely strict parents. There very religious, not aloud to where clothes that show to much skin, not aloud to date, not aloud to go to parities or dances, and barley they are barley aloud to leave the house. Can you just imagine a strict home, and the youngest daughter kills themselves? Like all the repercussions this has on the family and the whole town. The boys who narrate give a very interesting insight. They tell us the story from the past about what went down with the Lisbons when they were teenagers. They had lived on the same street and obsessed over this family, more specially the daughters. They describe them and there personalities and all the odd things about this family. These guys are outsiders but manage to tell a raw story about these girls. I think the way Eugenides narrated this book was just so clever. Overall, this book is very heart braking. The second time around the story still took me for a wild ride and had my jaw dropping. I was just so transported into this story. The writing is also so amazing. Armonson that it is hard being a teen age girl - When Cecilia and the boys watched as Dominic jumped off a roof - The father, and how he longed for a son, also how he is a teacher - How Cecilia always wore that old wedding dress - The way the boys made the connection of how girls feel - The setting, in , with the old clothes and records - Lux and her cigarettes - The Fence Removal - How grief affects a family - When the father throws a retainer and flushes it down the toilet - Lux's relationship with Trip -They girls only went to school and church - When Trip talks to the father - The Dance - Isolation - Lux destorys her records - The notes and phone calls with the boys - The Distraction First read: April 24 3. Overall a painful and thought provoking read. The Virgin Suicides is one of those books that you wish you could erase from your memory after finishing just so you can experience it all over again. Jeffrey Eugenides has the unique ability to transform a very simple story into one of complete beauty. Suicide isn't the most pleasant of topics, especially when it's the suicide of five adolescents, but Eugenides writes it so well that it is impossible not to appreciate it. He blends just enough dark humor in to keep it tasteful and incorporates The Virgin Suicides is one of those books that you wish you could erase from your memory after finishing just so you can experience it all over again. He blends just enough dark humor in to keep it tasteful and incorporates melancholy passages that completely numbed me. Almost every page of this book had a meaningful quote on it. I think this is mentioned in almost every review, but the first-person plural narration is done expertly. By using "us" and "we," Eugenides drew me into the story and made me feel as if I was one of those neighborhood boys obsessing over the Lisbon girls. I don't really know what else to say about this since the real beauty of this story comes through when you're reading it. I can't really begin to explain it through a review. The movie is one of my favorite book-to-film adaptations as well. Jan 04, Dem rated it really liked it. The story is set in s Suburbia. The Virgin Suicides tells the story of the Lisbon family. Told through the eyes of the neighbourhood boys who are obsessed with the five teenage sisters and they relate to the reader the tragic events that lead up the the suicides of the 5 Lisbon Girls. I have been pondering how how to write this review for the past 24 hours as I had so many feelin Wow! I have been pondering how how to write this review for the past 24 hours as I had so many feelings while and after reading this novel. When I started reading this story I was intrigued by the Lisbon family and found it difficult to put this book down, my feelings then turned to frustration as I wanted to get to know the characters as individuals and found myself looking for information that was not there. I wanted so much more from this novel and perceived early on that author was just not going to give it to to me the easy way. I found the writing and prose excellent and really made this novel a pleasure to read. I learned half ways through the novel that this book was about so much more than answers and found myself easily adapting to weirdness of the tale. I enjoyed the pace of the story and loved how the story was narrated in the first person plural by the neighbourhood boys and this is what made the novel so compelling for me. I would love to have read this book as a book club read as it is the sort of book that would make excellent discussion. I think only in a group discussion would I finally find the answers I am looking for! Would I recommend this novel to all of my friends. I will say it is not a depressing book but it is Bizarre and haunting. Feb 07, Vanessa rated it really liked it. I really loved the way this story was delivered, told from the point of view of the neighbourhood boys who have an obsessive fascination for the five Lisbon sisters who all succumb to suicide. It sounds utterly depressing and it is, but the way it's told it really captures the essence of adolescence yearnings, of unattainable fascinations of the elusive repressed sheltered Lisbon girls. The writing is as beautiful as the sisters, the story travels quickly almost without pause and you get really I really loved the way this story was delivered, told from the point of view of the neighbourhood boys who have an obsessive fascination for the five Lisbon sisters who all succumb to suicide. The writing is as beautiful as the sisters, the story travels quickly almost without pause and you get really caught in this captivating story told in this most compelling way. I was completely swept away with this stunning story with it's beautiful sense of melancholia and despair. There is no happy ending but that pretty much sums up suicide. The fact that these girls were in the prime of their life in the midst of their burgeoning womanhood makes this book all the more poetic and unnerving. View all 6 comments. The Reading Rush day 2: Read a book and watch the adaptation. Oct 16, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: 20th-century , young-adult , novels , literature , fiction , united-states. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides As an ambulance arrives for the body of Mary Lisbon, a group of anonymous neighborhood boys recall the events leading up to her death. The Lisbon's are a Catholic family, living in the suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 's. The father, Ronald, is a math teacher at the local high school. The mother is a homemaker. The family has five daughters: year-old Cecilia, year-old Lux, year-old Bonnie, year-old Mary, and year- old Therese. W The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides As an ambulance arrives for the body of Mary Lisbon, a group of anonymous neighborhood boys recall the events leading up to her death. Without warning, Cecilia attempts suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub. She is found in time and survives. A few weeks later, their parents allow the girls to throw a chaperoned party at their house in hopes of cheering Cecilia up. However, Cecilia excuses herself from the party, goes upstairs, and jumps out of her bedroom window. She is impaled on the fence post below, and she dies almost immediately. The Lisbon parents begin to watch their four remaining daughters more closely, which isolates the family from their community. Cecilia's death also heightens the air of mystery about the Lisbon sisters to the neighborhood boys, who long for more insight into the girls' lives. Shelves: literary-fiction , book-to-film-or-tv , contemporary , The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty. Maybe intriguing is more like it. This book filled me w "With most people," he said, "suicide is like Russian roulette. I had of course heard of this story over the years but had never managed to pick it up. What I remember most is the author's vivid writing; I will definitely be interested in reading more from him. View all 21 comments. All readers bring to their identifications their histories, and in this book, who you identify with—the voyeurs or the object of their voyeurism—may inform your reactions. If you identify with the family being looked at, you may ex All readers bring to their identifications their histories, and in this book, who you identify with—the voyeurs or the object of their voyeurism—may inform your reactions. If you identify with the family being looked at, you may experience a wonderful new perspective as a voyeur of voyeurs. The setting of The Virgin Suicides is a suburban Michigan town in the s. The story, in the form of a report from an investigation, is told in first- person plural by a now-adult male representative of the small-town residents who are being voyeurs, marveling at the past childhood suicides of the girls in the Lisbon family and unraveling their own complicated feelings, projections, and hurt as unwitting bystanders. And probably other families as well, but it was never seen, never talked about. But I never knew its nature because nobody ever talked to me about it and, unlike the Lisbons, we had no funeral or ceremony. But if we were, what did my odd dysfunctional family look like from the point of view of the voyeurs? Who were these onlookers? Why did they gawk but never speak? When my father did his deed, he was living alone in our house—my mother and we kids having fled for safety. After his suicide and before the now-empty house was sold, it was broken into by a bunch of kids who ransacked it—looking for what? Apparently there was interest. A couple of months after the death, when I was in a benign car accident, I got off with a warning for driving barefoot and without my license just by telling the officer my name. It turned out the police were well aware of my family. As was the local hospital. But this fact—that we were known —never landed with a thud in my consciousness until reading this novel. So I admit I started reading with a deliciously vindictive joy—what fun to gawk at the people looking in, breaking into the house, examining the family details. The story is very different from my own: the Lisbon girls reach out for help, yet they succumb to rage and their imprisonment, whereas I and my siblings, who simply accepted that there was no help, individually broke out and ran for life. Nevertheless this book was cathartic in ways that surprised me and are far too complicated to articulate. More a reminiscence than a story, The Virgin Suicides winds, slides around time, and lacks urgency. It was so real I find myself wishing I could talk to the boys-now-men. Outstanding book. View all 48 comments. My brain hurts. I found this story and the way it was told so annoying that by the time I turned the last page my head was spinning and smoke was coming out of my ears. Who were the characters here? The characters or the narrator s? Which role did they play in each others lives? But wait a minute. So why did this feel different then? And if not, why? Freak s! Not even I was that bad as a teenager. We had no instructions. Let me tell you about the virgins. Those bloody Virgins. Who were they? Why were they the way they were? Were they actually virgins? Can I be sure? And besides, when Lux killed herself she was no longer a virgin. Who knows? God, those Virgins. They took ages to die. I was tired of so much anticipation. And Mary being the last one to die. Why Mary? Catchy name, no? View all 20 comments. Readers also enjoyed. Young Adult. Literary Fiction. Adult Fiction. About Jeffrey Eugenides. Jeffrey Eugenides. Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, of Greek and Irish descent. He took his undergraduate degree at Brown University, graduating in He later earned an M. His novel, The Virgin Suicides, gained mainstream interest with the film adaptation directed by Sofia Coppola. The novel was reissued in Eugenides is reluctant to appear in public or disclose details about his private life, except through Michigan-area book signings in which he details the influence of Detroit and his high-school experiences on his writings. He has said that he has been haunted by the decline of Detroit. Jeffrey Eugenides lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife, the photographer and sculptor Karen Yamauchi, and their daughter. Part of it was set in Berlin, Germany, where Eugenides lived from to , but it was chiefly concerned with the Greek-American immigrant experience in the United States, against the rise and fall of Detroit. It explores the experience of the intersexed in the USA. Eugenides has also published short stories. Eugenides is the editor of the collection of short stories titled My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. The proceeds of the collection go to the writing center Chicago, established to encourage young people's writing. “The Virgin Suicides” Still Holds the Mysteries of Adolescence | The New Yorker

Devastated by the suicides of all their children, Mr. Lisbon quietly flee the neighborhood and are never seen again. Lisbon has a friend clean out the house and sell the family belongings in a yard sale; family photos and other mementos are put out with the trash and collected by the boys. The house is sold to a young couple from the Boston area. Unsure of how to react to the events, the adults in the community go about their lives as if nothing important really happened, but the boys cannot stop thinking about the Lisbon sisters and why they did what they did. Now middle-aged men themselves, they acknowledge that they had always loved the girls, and that the mystery surrounding their deaths will torment them for the rest of their lives. Coppola wrote the script for the film in after the project was already greenlit at another studio, adapting it from the source novel, of which she was a fan. Kathleen Turner was the first actor to sign on to the project, playing the Lisbon girls' oppressive mother; Turner had known Coppola after they co-starred together in Peggy Sue Got Married It was my first role that was more of a 'sexy' thing. I was also unsure about how large the role was gonna be, because a lot of it was without dialogue. When I met Sofia, I immediately knew that she would handle it in a delicate way Coppola was inspired by photographer Takashi Homma's photos of suburban Japan when choosing the filming locations; "I have always been struck by the beauty of banal details," she said, "and that is what suburban style is all about. In addition to original score composed for the film by Air , the film features songs by s-era performers and five tracks from the s by Sloan. Sofia Coppola wanted to convey the theme of adolescence in the suburbs in the soundtrack. The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May The Virgin Suicides received positive reviews from film critics, though some noted the film's discomforting thematic material. The site's critical consensus reads, " The Virgin Suicides drifts with a dreamlike melancholy that may strike some audiences as tedious, but Sofia Coppola's feature debut is a mature meditation on disaffected youth. Coppola has made [ Yet, on the surface, there is something wrong with this picture: how can a film in which a quintet of apparently normal girls commit suicide possibly be a celebration, and why would a filmmaker attempt to make it so unless she is uncommonly perverse? She is content with the air of mystery and loss that hangs in the air like bitter poignancy. Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine noted the film's dreamy, childlike nature, writing: "The narrator speaks of youth as if it existed and still exists in a near-fugue state. Scenes from the film first kisses, gossiping about neighbors are sinewy in nature and seem lifted from the pages of a lost photo album. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Theatrical release poster. James Lyons Melissa Kent. Release date. Running time. Cook as Mary Lisbon Hanna R. Hedlie Giovanni Ribisi as Narrator voice. Main article: The Virgin Suicides score. In the film, Giovanni Ribisi provides the voice of an adult Tim Weiner, who relays the events to the audience. Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 10 July The Times. Retrieved 17 July Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved The Independent. We know who dies, and how, and by what methods. By giving us this information immediately, with such cool distance, Eugenides directs our attention to different questions, to a different scale of novelistic inquiry. Even when all the unknowns become known, every detail accounted for, every witness interrogated, how much can we ever truly understand our own lives? The narrators are both elegiac and mordant, dipping in and out of lives, moments, acting as the collective consciousness of an entire neighborhood. Even as they become specific, studied, obsessed over, the Lisbon girls are never truly revealed, to either the reader or to the boys, who understand that their interest in the girls never gets them any closer to the truth of who the girls are. If anything, the girls become more mysterious, more powerful, forever out of reach. 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. As a writer, Jeffrey Eugenides builds a world so tight and atmospheric that the book operates like a weather system, with its own distinct logic, or like the closed circuit of an adolescent brain, attuned to signs and symbols, an addictive claustrophobia. Why do these details—spiked pineapple juice, rosy-pink marble, a dirty canvas tennis shoe—conjure so much? For the narrators, all this scrupulous attention to detail seems like an attempt at moral irreproachability, an effort to defend their authority to tell the tale of the Lisbon girls. By being unsparing in their trawl through the past, they can forestall charges of narrative agenda or impropriety, as if pure quantity of information could stand in for the truth. Even as these details accumulate—data drawn from every conceivable corner of the neighborhood, every nook of memory—they obscure the larger picture. Only later does it occur to them that the message the girls were sending might not have needed decoding, that all their conspiracy theories and painstaking efforts to crack the supposed code only obscured reality. Maybe the girls had merely wanted connection. A mild-mannered teacher and a strong-willed woman turn into a paralyzed captive and a harridan. Their daughters see themselves as captives of these parents, who hysterically project their own failure upon the children. The worship the girls receive from the neighborhood boys confuses them: If they are perfect, why are they seen as such flawed and dangerous creatures? And then the reality of sex, too young, peels back the innocent idealism and reveals its secret engine, which is animal and brutal, lustful and contemptuous. In a way, the Lisbon girls and the neighborhood boys never existed, except in their own adolescent imaginations. They were imaginary creatures, waiting for the dream to end through death or adulthood. We see her talking to a psychiatrist after she tries to slash her wrists. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Kathleen Turner as Mrs. James Woods as Mr. Kirsten Dunst as Lux Lisbon. Josh Hartnett as Trip Fontaine. Reviews The Virgin Suicides. Roger Ebert May 05, Now streaming on:. Powered by JustWatch. Now playing. Sibyl Carlos Aguilar. Ava Matt Zoller Seitz. The Artist's Wife Glenn Kenny. Coastal Elites Christy Lemire. Film Credits.

The Virgin Suicides movie review () | Roger Ebert

External Sites. User Reviews. User Ratings. External Reviews. Metacritic Reviews. Photo Gallery. Trailers and Videos. Crazy Credits. Alternate Versions. Rate This. A group of male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents in suburban Detroit in the mid s. Director: Sofia Coppola. Writers: Jeffrey Eugenides novel , Sofia Coppola. Available on Amazon. Added to Watchlist. From metacritic. Our Favorite '90s Movie Soundtracks. Favourite Movies. Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. What are you doing? Edit Cast Cast overview, first billed only: James Woods Lisbon Kathleen Turner Lisbon Kirsten Dunst Lux Lisbon Josh Hartnett Father Moody Danny DeVito Horniker A. Mary Lisbon Hanna Hall Cecilia Lisbon Leslie Hayman Therese Lisbon Chelse Swain Bonnie Lisbon Anthony DeSimone David Barker Robert Schwartzman Paul Baldino FourTee A Guide to the Films of Sofia Coppola. Edit Storyline A man about forty years of age tells the story from when he was a teenager in upscale suburban Detroit of his and three of his friends' fascination with the mysterious and doomed Lisbon sisters. Taglines: Beautiful, mysterious, haunting, invariably fatal. Just like life. Edit Did You Know? Sofia then directed Ms. Turner in this film. Quotes Narrator : In the end, Parkie won because of the Cadillac, Kevin Head because he had the killer weed, and Joe Hill Conley because he won all the school prizes which Trip thought would impress Mr. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report this. Frequently Asked Questions Q: Is the movie an adaptation or an original screenplay? Language: English. Runtime: 97 min 90 min TV. Sound Mix: Dolby Digital. Color: Color. Lisbon withdraws the girls from school, restricts them to the house, and draws the curtains of the house. She will later claim she wanted to give her daughters time alone to recover from Cecilia's suicide. Shortly afterwards, the boys begin to see Lux on the roof of the Lisbon house at night having sex with unknown men. When an ambulance appears at the Lisbon house several weeks later and Lux is wheeled out clutching her stomach, the neighborhood fears another suicide. In fact, Lux has faked a burst appendix in order to be taken to the hospital, where she can secretly obtain a pregnancy test. It is negative, and the sympathetic doctor tells her parents she had indigestion. Lux returns home. The Lisbon house continues to deteriorate. In January, due to local parents' requests, a progressively unstable Mr. Lisbon is fired from his teaching post. In the months that follow, no one is seen leaving the Lisbon house, and even the grocer stops his weekly deliveries. In April, as spring breaks, the Parks Department comes to cut down the Lisbons' elm, which has caught Dutch elm disease. As the Parks Department is about to finish the job, the girls burst from the house and defiantly ring the dead stump, and the Park Department moves the tree indefinitely far down its lists of removals. Just as the boys begin to feel they have lost the girls entirely, notes begin appearing in the boys' bicycles and shrubbery. The boys, after several efforts, succeed in telephoning the Lisbon girls, playing a record over the phone, giving the girls their phone number, and hanging up. The next day the girls call back with a song, and the two groups trade songs all evening until the girls are forced to hang up. The boys' subsequent calls are not answered, but a note appears requesting their help on midnight of June 15th. Arriving at the Lisbon house as instructed, ready to flee with the girls across the country, the boys find Lux smoking alone in the living room. She instructs them to wait in the living room for her sisters to finish packing while she, Lux, waits in the car. The boys wait until they are finally too suspicious. They begin to explore the house and find Bonnie's body hanging dead in the basement. Horrified, the boys flee home. Later, the boys realize that all the girls must have killed themselves—Bonnie by hanging, Therese by sleeping pills, Lux by asphyxiation—while the boys waited in the living room. Mary, who stuck her torso in the oven, is the only one whom the paramedics can save. Though Mary will survive for a month more, the community assumes she is as good as dead. The Lisbons hire a housecleaner and put the house on the market. The media descends on the neighborhood, concocting sensationalist and factually incorrect stories about the girls' lives and deaths. In July, Mary finally dies by taking sleeping pills. Coincidentally, her death marks the last day of the cemetery workers' strike, so she and her sisters can all be buried properly. After the funeral, the Lisbon parents move away, and a new young couple buys their house and begin renovations. At novel's end, the neighborhood boys, now middle-aged men, trace the suburb's decline following the Lisbon deaths, and lament the girls' suicides as selfish acts from which they have never been able to recover. Election Day is November 3rd! Make sure your voice is heard. Themes Symbols Motifs Key Facts. Important Quotations Explained. Summary Plot Overview. Next section Chapter 1. Popular pages: Virgin Suicides.

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