The Virgin Suicides (Anagram, 1993) is a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides.. It has become a contemporary classic thanks to its literary quality, as well as the fascination it has aroused among the public and critics. It is the first novel by the American author and was adapted to the cinema by Sofia Coppola in 1999.
The five beautiful and fragile Lisbon sisters live in an atmosphere of repression created by their parents. The home of a residential neighborhood becomes a prison, where contact with other adolescents is scarce and supervised with a magnifying glass. The teenage girls wither and within a short span of time they all commit suicide. The seduction of the terrible deaths will penetrate among those who knew these languid lolitas by Jeffrey Eugenides.
The Virgin Suicides
Dead flowers
The five Lisbon sisters commit suicide in just over a year. They all ranged in age from thirteen to seventeen.. Her grace, delicacy, her way of understanding the world and the love of sisters that they had for each other was completely swept away. The arbitrary confinement of a religious and fearful mother and an accomplice father, who would never have imagined the audacity of her daughters, caused an act similar to a catharsis in her offspring. Some girls, inexperienced in that of life and who had their games and codes, they had decided to leave this world in the most unique ways, to increase the legend and fantasy that awoke in all those who passed in front of that house. They hardly figured out what was happening inside, nor the tragic ending.
It is difficult to imagine how five young people take their own lives at the very beginning of life, being themselves little flowers that wither with isolation and the blind trust they had in each other. There is a poetic halo in this whole story, in its characters, in Eugenides' narration, which is difficult to convey if he is not reading the book. Life, death, the awakening to existence, desire, illusion and freedom are topics that are dealt with slowly and savoring a very brief life cycle.. The five teenagers, beautiful and tender, heartless, had themselves. That brotherhood, that nucleus, perhaps pushed them to say goodbye to the life they never started.
five lolitas
The strength of the novel stands out in the characters, in the way they die, as well as in the narrative voice. Jeffrey Eugenides uses the collective storyteller to tell the story of the girls, through, in part, the buzz that exists around them.. What makes a difference with other books, in addition to creating a great effect on the reader, who will feel as if he had also met the five sisters. The characters have extraordinary strength and are unique. They seduce and move in equal measure and are loaded with poetic beauty beyond tragedy.
Likewise, it is worth noting the importance of the feminine, the innocence of adolescence and the power of sexual attraction of these very young girls who attend an initiation journey together that cannot take place beyond their home. The truncated youth that is so similar to Nabokov's book, in Eugenides' novel takes shape with premature and voluntary death of the young ladies Despite the doom, the book has a languid tone, perfect for the subject it treats with such lyricism.
Conclusions
The Virgin Suicides is a beautiful story marked by the tragedy of five adolescent sisters who end their lives in an act of purification, ecstasy, or abandonment. The text is written with a beautiful poetic prose that will move the reader who will savor each page as if they were slightly bitter sweets. But, on the other hand, it is a book that cries out for freedom and exudes delicacy, and that allows itself to be covered by a mantle of legend increased by the memory of the dead sisters. If they did it out of desperation, out of solidarity, or extravagance... these are possibilities that remain open. Finally, The Virgin Suicides it is also a portrait of the loss of innocence and the deterioration of youth that is very reminiscent of the lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
About the Author
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit (United States) in 1960.Although he is of Greek descent. He studied at Brown University, graduating in English Literature, and at Stanford University he completed a Master's in Creative Writing. He has published in different magazines and is a short story and novel writer.
He is an author of international importance and has enormous recognition. As for his novels, The Virgin Suicides received the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize for Novel. The bridal plot It is a book that has reconfirmed and positioned him as one of the most dazzling writers on the current literary scene. His three novels have been published in Spanish by Ed. Anagram. Today she also teaches creative writing at Princeton University.