Get ready to feel old. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides’s dreamy debut novel about five teenage sisters who all kill themselves over the course of a single year, turns 25 this week—an age, I am contractually obligated to quip here, that the Lisbon sisters will never reach, no matter how yellowed the pages that hold them get (single tear: wiped). To be honest, when I re-read the novel earlier this month, I had no idea that it had a big anniversary coming up; I was just in-between books, trying to decide what to read next, and came across an old copy on my shelf. I picked it up and idly read the first three pages; I knew after that I would read it through to the end. They are very good first pages.
Even so, I read on with some trepidation. I had read the novel in high school (after seeing the Sofia Coppola adaptation, I’m sorry to say, but what do you want from me, I was 14), and I remembered it as gauzy and claustrophobic; I remembered it was about teenage girls killing themselves in gruesome fashion; I remembered that the girls were sexy; I remembered that the novel was written by a man. Uh, oh, I thought, already hooked on that early image of Cecilia gouging her initials into the “foamy layer” of dead fish-flies she finds coating a Thunderbird. I was worried that I would find that this book, which I also remembered that I loved, had aged badly. That in 25 years it had grown stale, or trite, or offensive. That if I read it again, I would somehow lose it. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/does-the-virgin-suicides-hold-up-25-years-later/
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| Szene aus dem Film von Sophia Coppola |
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