I really enjoyed this book, the second Eugenides I have read this season, and I was glad I did not hear about the "twist" (for lack of a better word) in The Virgin Suicides. I am not sure how I avoided hearing about it considering the book is now over 20 years old and has been hanging just on the periphery of my reading life, I actually walked out on friends watching the movie in college but I was a stupid then and wanted to go get drunk instead of sitting around watching some movie with a group that has since become my closest friends.

 

It is not really a twist, and that explains why I never heard about it, when you've set out in the title the fact that five teenage girls are to commit suicide, everything else fades into the background. Eugenides sets us up for the hit, hiding the narrator in plain sight. He happens to be, well, whoever he is, but, as it starts, you get the feeling it could just as easily be written by Ms. Perl, Uncle Tucker, Peter Sissen or any of the others from the cast of small town busybodies that feel familiar in a way that makes me uncomfortable--much of this book makes me feel uncomfortable, but in the way it should, challenging the way I look at the world. As it moves on, however, the narrator starts to appear less a quiet observer and more a Humbert Humbert, the story itself being misshapen through his perspective and manipulated through his writing. It would be/will be interesting to read again, knowing the role the boys play in the end and watching for that dynamic, but I am happy I got to feel my way through the first reading deciding and then second guessing my feelings on certain characters, trying to guess how it all goes down, then being lulled, like the boys, into a shock.

 

Something in how we never quite see the girls clearly. The narrator insists his clutch know them better than the other townspeople and journalists, but we see the Lisbon girls through the narrators reaction, which is that of every adolescent boy. They are mysterious. The boys are very aware of the Lisbon girls' bodies down to odors and facial hair, and they are transfixed by them. The whole book they see  the girls the same way they did when Peter Sissen peeked around upstairs, enthralled by the ladies undergarments, makeup and Tampax, and in a demonstrable way, like Sissen, who grabbed the brassiere off the crucifix, they are, decades later, still swiping ephemera from the objects of their desires.

 

Actually the later collection, which we learn about first, is less weird seeming to be part of an investigation of the suicides. It is when we learn that the boys have already started a collection that I really started to question the narrator.

 

The Virgin Suicides will dump you right back into the hormonal throes of adolescent love, but it does  so in a way that gives it weight, that respects the pain and damage we can do even in our most foolish years and leaves out the nostalgia. 

Lost in Translation - Sofia Coppola, Lan... The film. The bum crack.

You know. Unattractive older man with hair and skin issues has fantasy relationship with beautiful young girl. I was assured by more than one middle aged man that hey, no, it just isn't like that. It's not that kind of movie.

So, why the fuck do I have to look at a young girl's bum crack as the fucking opening scene, the very first thing I see in this movie. I guess the middle aged men who spun me the line were only listening to the dialogue, not looking at the pictures? Is that it?

Not long into the movie and I swear if I'd had to look at that bitch's bum crack one more time, I would have thrown something at the screen. I was shocked when she finally went out. She got dressed!! In Japan. A place where they would have loved to see a young girl's bum crack on public display. Leerly laughs there. That's a sic, by the way. The other thing that completely took me aback about this movie was the really cheap sneering laughs at the Japanese. I guess we won the war so we are allowed to? Accent, culture, technology, you name it. The scene early on where some sort of prostitute comes into our hero's room and wants him to abuse her is the most embarrassingly racist and not funny scene I think I've ever seen in a movie since world war two.

The good thing about the girl's bum crack is that when she was showing it to the camera, she didn't talk - or if she was talking, we couldn't hear since, thankfully, her mouth faced away from the camera. Because when she talked, man, was it complete drivel. I mean, when she opined to our middle-aged hero (who is so behaving himself by not shagging her, but shagging some other one night stand instead) that she just didn't know what to do with her life? Like she'd tried writing and she'd tried photography and she was like you know, crap at both of them? The obvious suggestion to make was 'have you tried acting yet, deary?' but our hero missed his chance. He told this vacuous boring piece of ennui stuck to a quite large arse that she should stick to writing. Hilarious. I guess a vacuous piece of advice was in keeping. I thought maybe the whole thing was supposed to be some sort of comedy about American idiots and I was missing the point.

This film even has the compulsory if completely irrelevant scene in a men's sex club so we can see naked women performing for the male audience. I swear I'm going to fall over in a faint if the remake of Mary Poppins when it comes, is lacking one of those.

Was I? Was I missing the point? Or was this drivel?

I have a shelf 'better written than Harry P' Do I need another one? 'not better written than Harry P'?