Skip to main content
By
The Virgin Suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides

Click here to check for availability at AFPLS

The title reveals the ending, so there is no surprise, but that is not to say there is no suspense. The Virgin Suicides recounts the story of the Lisbon sisters and the tragic gradual unraveling of their well-structured existence in suburban Detroit of the 1970s. Fate leads inevitably towards the final chapter of the book, which is also the final chapter of their short lives. Cecelia is the first to go (by self-defenestration) and her sudden death seems to set a chain of events in motion that eventually brings all her sisters with her (there is even speculation that Cecelia’s suicide released a contagion that infected her siblings).

The story is told in the voice of the neighborhood boys who shared the same street and the same school with the Lisbon girls, secretly admiring them, mostly from afar, in life as well as after death. The identities of the boys remain somewhat mysterious to the reader, when they, years after the tragic events foretold in the title, reassemble the facts through interviews, realia (“Exhibit no. 59”), newspaper clippings, and personal reminiscences.

This book is a record of suburban dystopia and the disintegration of the American family, a familiar theme in such movies as American Beauty and Revolutionary Road (and the book!). Jeffrey Eugenides is the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Middlesex, also an excellent read.
The 1999 movie with Kathleen Turner, James Woods, and Kirsten Dunst is pretty faithful to the book and well acted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Here we are / Graham Swift

By
This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more
By
Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010
2 comments
Read more

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

By
Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No
1 comment
Read more