Reviews with content warning for Vomit - The Virgin Suicides

Reviews tagging 'Vomit'

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

19 reviews

katharinaamaliae's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

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withlivjones's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

I really wanted to enjoy this book. The premise is intriguing and the prose is very well-written, but overall this book is just about a group of grown men looking back at and obsessing over five teenage girls who were very clearly suffering, and that made it very difficult to get through.

Eugenides’ writing style is very poetic. His descriptions so vividly convey the setting of seventies suburbia, where everyone seems to know everyone else. The Lisbon house itself, and its gradual and inevitable decay that mirrors the decay of the family inside, is also very well described. The use of the first person plural pronoun “we” as the narrator is an interesting and bold choice but is excellently handled and gives a clear sense of the mob mentality of the neighbourhood boys (who later become men). While many of them are named and described as individuals, by using “we” they blend into a sort of homogenous group that parallels how they see the Lisbon sisters.

However, the vivid descriptions take up the bulk of the novel to the extent that the story moves painfully slowly, to the point where I had been waiting for the rest of the suicides to occur for so long that I was almost relieved when they did. It even could have been cut down to an excellent short story, but as it is the prose is rather difficult to get through and there are so many unnecessary tangents where the timeline confusingly switches between past when the girls’ suicides happen and present when the now fully grown men are investigating them. Furthermore, the extent that these poor girls have been put on a pedestal by these men (who barely knew them, merely watched them from afar!) over years (decades, even) of morbid obsession made me deeply uncomfortable. It seems to romanticise their mental illnesses in a rather dangerous way.

I can appreciate the fact that this book has some very well-written prose, but in the end is just wasn’t for me.

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saoreads's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Its gruesome details are described as prosaic and poetic, with the metaphorical lines humming along the monstrosity of taking one's own life. It gave statistical inputs and the relating aspects of typical boys' adolescence, making it literally impossible to forget their first loves. The voyeurism was in one point of view, yet with the other it was the same too, though the latter didn't get to live long. After years and decades of searching for the "why", it somehow led to a point of redundancy, evidence, bias, and notions agreeing with the deed itself. That growing up sucks and daydreaming is better. Life wasn't in their control, so they took matters into their own hands, though it spoke of unrelenting grief hanging to a thread and plenty of factors no one might've noted. The fact that the parent's way of putting up their children suffocated them, or it might have stemmed from a faulty gene (or so they say, and to the extremes of five of them all?), or they took religion in their own different interpretations, there are plenty of what ifs that arise. However, the decision made brought agony and awful influence to their surroundings. It's one to assess yet not to act upon.

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nenac0's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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jenny_librarian's review against another edition

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dark reflective slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

2.5

This is a book about the patriarchal tendency of dehumanizing women. Which should be enough to tell you why I didn’t like it at all.

The writing itself is good, but that’s about the only redeeming quality to this book. The rest is just men being… well, men. I get what the author wanted to achieve with this, but why it needed to be written in this way is beyond me.

I keep hoping the next “classic” I read is going to be better, and I keep being disappointed because those “classics” were written by allocishet white men in a time women were seen as little more than property.

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