Virgin suicides (urspr publ 1993; utgåvan 2000)

Don't tell anyone but they all die in the end. ( )

Over the span of a year in the early 1970s, the five teenage Lisbon sisters commit suicide, leaving an indelible scar on the close-knit Michigan community where they live. Twenty years later, the unnamed narrator, one of a group of young men besotted with the Lisbons, tries to give an account of those tragic events. His intention is to present an objective report, complete with “exhibits” and testimonies. The prose, however, is anything but detached or scientific – it often burns with a febrile, poetic intensity. The very normal suburban setting becomes the backdrop for a surreal tale which veers from gothic tragedy to dark comedy and back again. These incongruities invite an allegorical reading – the Lisbons as metaphors for the boys’ coming of age and sexual awakening, the novel itself as an unbearably nostagic elegy for a past which seems just beyond reach and yet will never come back. ( )

This is definitely one of the oddest, yet least satsfying books I've ever read. It's fine that we know that all 5 of the Lisbon girls commit suicide by the end, but the way that the author paces the story makes it drag on and on. Maybe it was because the story was told through the collective lens of the neighborhood boys, but the entire thing is just so disjointed and wordy in the most predictable way. The whole time I was reading it my brain was going "are we there yet; are they dead yet..." ( )

I like what the novel is trying to do. But I didn’t enjoy reading it. ( )

Just didn't really do it for me. ( )