Reviews
quite frankly i don’t understand the hype, it’s really confusing just for it to be such a boring read, i think i might watch the film and try again at reading, and hopefully i’ll like it more if i know what’s going on .
i did the 50 page rule, but wanted to see why everyone loves it sm so i went to pg100 but still didn’t like or understand so i am quitting (for now)
I can’t believe that the lisbon sisters took their lifes on my birthday
well-written with an interesting style and an intriguing story. i feel like i simultaneously did and didn't understand what happened and the lisbons felt larger than life but also fully hollow, which i suppose is the point of the book. the outside perspective really worked for the story being told here and i thought the idea of a collective of items, documents, interviews, etc. all pertaining to a specific event/year of events that fundamentally altered a town was well executed. the narration was voyeuristic in a confounding way; i was largely disgusted by the second-hand account, but also could feel the fascination the narrator(s) had for the lisbon girls
It was compelling at the start but lost its pacing a little and I found myself getting bored during the middle, but it picked up towards the end and I enjoyed the last few pages.
boys don’t treat girls like human
“In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”
Oh what I would give to read this book from the point of view of the sisters.
to be a woman is to perform or whatever that quote was
Uomini si chiederanno cosa voglia dire essere una ragazza e non troveranno risposta…..
“The Lisbon girls, on the other hand were ‘like something behind glass. Like an exhibit.’” *** Elusive bodies constitute male desire. This is my key takeaway from the novel. We never learn who the Lisbon sisters truly are because information about them is delivered in fragments through the narratives of the neighborhood boys-turned-men. Essentially, the novel epitomizes the male gaze: the Lisbon sisters are reduced to objects of sight. Because of how much traction their family gained due to their unorthodox lifestyle, the girls’ ‘virgin’ suicides were treated as mere casualties in the end—prone to oversimplification not only by the boys but the suburban community as a whole.
I first read this book 11 years ago—it was 2013, I was 13 and on tumblr and that’s enough info for you to know what kind of person I was like back then. and so ofc back then I too was like the narrators and fetishized tf out of the lisbon girls. it’s only now realizing as an adult that the whole point is how these men were just the original incels lmfaooo. this book is fucking phenomenal. so many reviews here are filled with people still speculating the suicides and it just proves that they can’t think outside of the narrators. it’s really not hard to understand why the girls did it—their lives fucking sucked. what made it unbearable to them is that nobody ever understood them, not just the boys but their entire community. they were constantly just interpreted as some abstract, mysterious creatures, when really, they were just girls.
nem na morte somos gente
it’s literally impossible to be a woman
** spoiler alert ** I did think this book would be a five star read but it just didn’t meet that bar tbh. but i did find the book interesting because it gave us the perception of how the town saw the five lisbon girls, so we will never really know what they experienced in the time that cecila committed suicide and their own. i think we can only conjure up in our minds what they went through, considering we would later find out that their parents never cleaned up the party they threw for cecilia. the torment of not being able to leave the house on top of it falling apart/not being clean must’ve taken a massive toll on them along with their younger sisters death. i can only speculate that this along with other issues in their personal lives led to their suicides. i don’t want to sit here and point fingers at the parents but they definitely did not support their daughters in the way they probably should have after cecilia’s death, even though it must’ve been hard for them too.
I loved how it was told from the male gaze. It meant that the story was haunting and we know very little about the Lisbon sisters.
The title of the virgin suicides made me curious hence I decided to read it. While I enjoyed various aspects of the book such as the portrayal of the male gaze through the boys that narrate the story or the impact of growing up in a religious house as a young girl, I ultimately did not enjoy reading this book. The writing was slow paced, it felt like nothing at all was happening, even events which should have an impact just felt flat to me. The book constantly goes on tangents speaking about random things in unessacary detail. Also while I understand this book came out in the nineties the ableism and racism in this book is so off putting. The description of a character named Joe in chapter one was so horrid I nearly stopped reading then. I only continued because online readers insisted it was just one weird passage. In summary the virgin suicides reads like your weird cousin telling you a story from years ago.
haunted me, still does
Too arty for me. All thematic, no plot.
the blurry hasty pace of me speeding thru this book matched the hazy fog-like pace and ambience of the book. to be immortalised in the eyes of immature men as something divine when we’re just humans is the way men overcompensate for their lack of emotional growth when they were teens as well.
Emma Cline writing the into for the anniversary edition of this book was everything I never knew I needed
cool use of narration, ethereal/timeless/drifty writing, but didn’t really catch me otherwise. I can see why this grabbed everyone when it came out, and Eugenides is indeed the goat when it comes to telling us how things look and smell and taste, but the rest of the book was bland and lacking traction in not a good way. I read it, probably won’t read it again.
i mean at least i finished it
steady, meandering, seamless, lurid, continuous prose. learned a lot of new words (lol), boring at times, but still very very good prose. i’m a fast, greedy reader that enjoys moving on and finding out but i found myself going back to the beginning of a sentence or paragraph a lot especially the last one wow.
i liked it. i “liked” it. i Kind of liked it.
it’s honestly pretty problematic LOL. written from the perspective of a nameless infatuated high school boy (who i don’t think even gets to speak to the sisters), there is a weird observer/subject relationship that is inevitably creepy and depraved. the boys keep an archival record of the lisbon girls— we hear of pictures, diaries, outfits, objects, interactions, anecdotes— we spend a lot of time on the surface probing in without success. the descriptions are precise, keen, specific. the novel indulges in its voyeurism. there is so much on the surface that in the end says so little.
during their confinement, the girls and objects within the house blend together, their objectification becoming clearer as the boys simply don’t know them as people. the girls become objects of intrigue, mystery, infatuation, lust— mostly i think because of their unattainability— but they never become people. the narrator seems surprised when the girls talk back. i loved the few interactions we get from the girls, the few glimpses of interiority and personhood (which btw shocks the narrator every single time it happens), and this me realize i am becoming one of these nameless observers...
during prom, therese says “we just want to live. if anyone would let us.” i think this signals as a kind of hyperawareness of surveillance that the girls know they are subjected to. in addition to a strict mother, these boys keep crazy tabs on them which we know they’re aware of. they literally kill themselves in front of the guys so it’s hard for me to imagined they liked them. the ending to me feels like resentment, projection. he calls the girls selfish, too in tune with their own pain to see people calling in from the outside. maybe they just want u all off their dick? lol? i could be reading this super wrong.
lux’s hypersexualization was also soo weird because she’s literally 14…
also some weird random racist parts and he drops the hard r once which was kind of jarring
i think this is a book about how much the surface can contain and how little it can say. liked what he did here but got a bit weird for me. also looked up a picture of the author and that’s exactly the kind of guy i imagined wrote this book.
Highlights
In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
We mention this now only to show that even college students, free to booze and fornicate, bring about their own ends in large numbers. Imagine what it was like for the Lisbon girls, shut up in their house with no blaring stereo or ready bong around.
We just want to live. If anyone would let us.
silently weeping
"Está muy claro, doctor, que usted nunca ha sido una niña de trece años."
หนูยังไม่แก่พอจะรับรู้ว่าชีวิตมันห่วยแตกยังไงด้วยซ้ำ
เห็นได้ชัดเลยล่ะ ว่าคุณไม่เคยเป็นเด็กสาววัยสิบสาม
They lost their high heels on the way kissed us in the humid darkness, and then slipped away to throw up demurely in the outside bushes.
NOT AGAIN
"'At thirteen, Cecelia should be allowed to wear the sort of makeup popular among girls her age, in order to bond with them. The aping of shared customs is an indispensable step in the process of individualization.'"
“Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”
"’but why do you care? it’s not a contest.’” "’yes, it is. you just can't see it because you've always been the winner.’”
None of the teachers insisted on their participating, with the result that all the healing was done by those of us without wounds.
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl
real
It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
:(
They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
She smiled then, a loose, clumsy smile, genuine, unpretty.
She took one more step and her face reappeared. For a second it didn't seem alive: it was too white, the cheeks too perfectly carved, the arched eyebrows painted on, the full lips made of wax. But then she came closer and we saw the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since.
and his lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had.
Often, in today's world, the extended child- hood American life has bestowed on its young turns out to be a wasteland, where the adolescent feels cut off from both childhood and adulthood.
"I don't know what you're feeling. I won't even pretend."
We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl
Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn't even had. Mr. Hedlie mentioned that fin-de-siècle Vienna witnessed a similar outbreak of suicides on the part of the young, and put the whole thing down to the misfortune of living in a dying empire. It had to do with the way the mail wasn't delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil's night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents' group donated a bench in the girls' memory to our school.
Mrs. Lisbon's mother, Lema Crawford, mentioned during that same crackling phone call to New Mexico that she had given Mrs. Lisbon most of her summer pickles and preserves (she had hesitated saying "summer" because that had been the summer Cecilia had died, and all the while the cucumbers, strawberries, and even she herself, seventy-one years old, had gone on growing and living).