Well Read #2 The Virgin Suicides
Well, I've been meaning to read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides for a good long while and I finally got around to it. The best part was that my library copy had this post-it note stuck on the front page:
Yeah, it's gorgeously gloomy and all that. It's about the beautiful and doomed Lisbon sisters and the neighbourhood boys who gaze at them wistfully from across the street. There are dead flies, dying elm trees and it tells you right at the beginning that all the sisters commit suicide. So, not the kind of reading that really cheers you up.
But that's okay. What irks me, though, is that the sisters never seem to do anything other than be mysteriously beautiful and the boys never seem to do anything other than gaze dreamily at them. Why doesn't someone run away to join the circus or build a race car or climb Kilimanjaro? Why does Mrs. Lisbon think it's a good plan to hide them all inside the house? Hasn't she ever read any fairy tales? Locking up the daughters never ends well. There's the moral, if that's what you're after.
Yeah, it's gorgeously gloomy and all that. It's about the beautiful and doomed Lisbon sisters and the neighbourhood boys who gaze at them wistfully from across the street. There are dead flies, dying elm trees and it tells you right at the beginning that all the sisters commit suicide. So, not the kind of reading that really cheers you up.
But that's okay. What irks me, though, is that the sisters never seem to do anything other than be mysteriously beautiful and the boys never seem to do anything other than gaze dreamily at them. Why doesn't someone run away to join the circus or build a race car or climb Kilimanjaro? Why does Mrs. Lisbon think it's a good plan to hide them all inside the house? Hasn't she ever read any fairy tales? Locking up the daughters never ends well. There's the moral, if that's what you're after.