2007-02-09

the virgin suicides

Does anyone remember the movie? I don't.... I'm terribly uncool because I'm not the greatest fan of Sofia Coppola (I was bored to pieces by Lost in Translation) or Kirsten Dunst (I continue to believe she was best in Interview with the Vampire).Although, Marie Antoinette moved me a little closer to liking both....

Anyway, I'm in the midst of reading the book, by Jeffrey Eugenides. (Surely I'm at least five years behind everyone else.)

The premise is fascinating; five sisters will commit suicide by the end, the narrator tells us at the start. He even tells us how they die. So the mystery is why. And what's with the Virgin Mary symbolism?

Don't worry, if you're not familiar with the story, I'm not ruining it for you.

The secondary mystery -- at least, for me -- is the identity of the narrator. It's as if the narration is being done by all the neighbourhood boys using one voice....

Read this, from page 43, after the boys get their hands on the youngest girl's diary:

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

I love this. It's a man's memory on a boy's take on a young woman's mind. The message being that a woman's mind is a mystery that could never possibly be uncovered.

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