This is a continuation of this bookray started by peggysmum.
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The 5 Lisbon sisters are beautiful, interchangeable, forbidden and doomed. They are watched by the neighbourhood boys who document the lives of these untouchable creatures, locked away from the world by controlling parents.

When Cecilia, the youngest Lisbon sister, attempts and later succeeds in committing suicide, the boys watch, unable to prevent the other girls from following their sister's example.

The boys' lives are forever changed and this narrative is the form of dossier created by the boys in order to make sense of what happened to the girls and to themselves.

I loved this, Eugenides narrative has a very ethereal quality and I felt that the story was less about the suicides and more about life and the town and the way the boys struggled with the events of one of their formative years.

Middlesex has been sitting on Mt TBR for months now and this has given me the incentive to pick it up some time soon.

Sorry again for the hiccup - I already have eddi's address and I'll mail it off tomorrow.

Uh-oh! EDDI read the book and posted it on to me but hasn't had a chance to journal yet!
Sorry, don't know how to leave space for you, EDDI -- but I'm sure its not too important what order the journal's in.

Anyway, the book arrived here today and I'm hoping to start it on the weekend.

An odd idea for a story. There seems to be a new genre of literature emerging that should be labelled "Domestic Doomsday"!

I appreciated the author's abilities as a craftsman and was amazed at his ability to keep coming up with the minutae of our lives in the 60's/70's. His description of even the smells of the carpet were real memory triggers. Fantastic imagery throughout.

Having said that I felt annoyed with his implication at the end of the girls perhaps being some sort of canaries in the coalmines of American society. Smacked very badly of American selfindulgence. Why do people with the most in life whinge the loudest?

Final comment -- those boys were weird!

Thanks for sharing this book thru the bookring. Please don't get me wrong about the book, I can't remember the last time a book triggered such strong emotions in me. Surely the sign of an author doing his job.

Posted to somethinksfishy on 21/06/05

:D arrived today, it's next on my list, so i should be done with it pretty quickly :)

Ok, so maybe not so quickly :) hehe

Finished this off this morning. I had already seen the movie so I think that ruined the book a little for me. I still really enjoyed it!
Cathyinoz is right about the fantastic imagery throughout!

Posting this off to celestewa tomorrow, hopefully to be received before she goes on her holiday!

I found this book quite interesting. It was written as an account of the suicide of the Lisbon sisters well after the fact by one of the boys who grew up in the same street.

What I found interesting was the style of writing. It was as if the narractor was writing in a state of disassociation. This helped you understand how the girls themselves were also feeling after the death of the first sister Cecilia.

It was also interesting how everybody stood on the outside looking in, whilst they were looking out and nobody did anything to make difference. As the narrtor said, they werent surprised when the other girls died.

Very different from Middlesex, has he written anything else????

Posted today 13th September. Sorry had trouble getting to the post office until now.

Arrived safely.

I didn't enjoy this book at all. I read "Middlesex" just before it and was looking forward to another Jeffery Eugenides book but this one disappointed me.

It read like a teenagers musings - disjointed and often irrelevant. We never find out the reason for any of the suicides although I suspect the 4 girls were being smothered by their parents. The whole book dribbled on like someone on drugs was telling the story. There was never a real point and I kept expecting something to happen, some reason for the suicides or incite by one of the external characters but it never came.

As someone who has considered suicide I know the darkness that takes you there but this was never explored by the narrator. Maybe the boys were incapable of imagining such pain but it made the story seem superficial.

Off to crimson-tide when I get the addy.

Arrived today. It's two or three down the pile I think. And I do like the look of the larger than usual font size!

A very strange and different book, but oddly compelling. Jeffrey Eugenides certainly is a gifted story teller. His prose is stark yet lyrical, macabre but with a wry sense of humour, and his powers of observation and precise detail make you feel you are right there looking on with the boys who collectively form the 'narrative team' even though the tale is written by only one of them. Overall I thought the book was haunting but not depressing, despite dealing with a pretty depressing subject. On the surface the subject is suicide, but the underlying message for me is more about 'knowing but not understanding'.

My few criticisms would be that I felt it did lag a little in the centre section; and I personally am a bit uncomfortable with the way that it tended to romanticise suicide.


This is the remainder of the list for the ray, which I've taken from the journal of the original book:
- gypsyrose02 (Seville Grove, WA) ----> moved to end of list
- Unbalanced (Queanbeyan, NSW)
- tqd (Sydney, NSW)
- gypsyrose02 (Seville Grove, WA) <----

At present I'm awaiting a reply from gypsyrose02.

Update 19th Dec: gypsyrose02 asks to be put further down the list, so now awaiting an address from Unbalanced.
Address received, so posting tomorrow.

Arrived safely today - Thank you Crimson-tide. Despite 200+ books on Mount TBR, I've made a start on this book already. So far, it has piqued my Unbalanced mind.

Different from Middlesex, but still a great read. I guess the frustrating thing was that we truly do not know the true reasons for the Girls' suicides, but there's a number of slants that you could pick. I would pick the soul destroying religious oppresive suffocation served by the parents - which not only eliminated all character and spirit from their children, but also made themselves totally inept in facing life itself.

And I agree what Celestwa says: "It was also interesting how everybody stood on the outside looking in, whilst they were looking out and nobody did anything to make difference." In fact I found it frustrating as well. And what I felt more disturbing was that these girls were "normal" - just see how they were at the dance - And yet there poor girls were imprisoned by their insane parents, and forced to survive as animals in their own home. Such religious madness would drive anyone insane.

Sending this book now to tqd.

Turned up in the mail today, thanks unbalanced! I've got a few other bookrings waiting in the wings, so to speak (they really do all come at once, don't they?) but I'll get onto this asap. I'm looking forward to it!

Hmm, a very puzzling read. It's not about the Lisbon girls so much as the boys that grew up around them (and loving them, but not them so much as the idea of them, since they never really knew them).

I think I just used the word "them" too much. It's lost all meaning!!

I found the style interesting, but distancing. (But considering the subject matter, thank god for some distance.) It's got this stilted almost-whodunnit style (like a hardboiled detective dictating his case notes to his secretary), but we never find anything out. We never find out why it all happens. And I think in the case of suicide, there is a strong urge to find out why, and that urge is frustrated here. But then again, I appreciated being able to put a big wodge of emotional distance between myself and the suicides.

We never know anything about our unnamed narrator. We never find anything out about the Lisbon girls, really. (I particularly liked towards the very end when he says something about never knowing Bonnie, and I realised the other girls had a "tag" of some sort - the promiscuous one, the brainy one, etc - and that Bonnie didn't have anything that made her stand out to me.) The theories that were put forward at the time to explain the suicides (Cecilia being the "crazy one" and infecting the others) is dismissed at first by the narrator from his closer point of view, but at the end he seems to be infected with those ideas himself and accepting them as true.

But, as a slice of late 20th century coming-of-age mood writing, it was very fascinating. (Although I think american readers might understand the actual period and place more than me!)

I only just finished this book an hour or so ago, and I think I'm going to be pondering it for some time yet! (And renting the movie some day soon, I meant to see it when it first came out, but never got around to it.)

I'll send a message to gypsyrose02 and get this continuing its journey. Thanks for letting me be a part of its travels!

UPDATE 25-JAN-2006: Sent to gypsyrose02 today.

received today. yay. thankyou. cant wait.

is there anyone else for this? otherwise i might organise a wild release.

reserved for camis for three book shy of a load.

on its way to camis as part of the 3 books shy of a load. enjoy.

Received in the mail - thank you! Looking forward to reading this.

Hmm, enjoyed is probably not the right word for this, but I found it a very interesting and compelling read.

This is now off to Purplerosebud from a swap.

I'd quite forgotten I'd won this book! Thanks Camis, an interesting book for Mt TBR I think.

I've now acquired another copy of this book so I'm not going to hold up its travels any longer. It's going off to Teachie who has taken it out of the VBB on BCUK Extra.

Thanks for this Purplerosebud. It going on Mt Tbr for the moment til I catch up with all the swaps I owe.

I found this a rather weird and unsatisfying book. I kept reading on hoping to find out why the girls commited suicide. Perhaps I just missed the point of the book.
This is now off to veganmedusa who chose this in the Browse my TBR's on BookObsessed.

Thanks teachie! I've already started reading this and am quite drawn into the story. Thanks too for the card and car sticker. :)

A wonderful book. I finished reading it a couple of days after getting it but have been sort of mulling it over (okay, and then I just forgot to do a journal entry).
I loved the style of writing, the whole feel of the book. Heartbreaking watching the girls slowly suffocate. And everyone else just watching, because kids don't get the whole picture till later, and adults just don't want to interfere or get involved.
I can't understand why they lasted as long as they did - Celia was the smartest one in my book. They were never going to escape from their parents and be normal - they would have been kept captives and then possibly married off to good Christian men who would keep them captive at home while churning out sprogs.
I loved the way they did it at the end, very melodramatic, romantic - just so teenager-y - maybe a bit of payback to the boys too, for watching them suffer all those years but just being too busy in their own normal lives to care that much.

Posted today to livrecache, for the bookobsessed.com Southern Cross July exchange. :)

Caught (after four months)! It had been tossed over the side fence of the house we moved back into over the weekend, along with a whole collection of other mail addressed to us. What happened to 'return to sender'?

I'm so pleased to have finally received this book, when VeganMedusa took so much care to send it from my wishlist for the Southern Cross Down Under exchange. I've already started it as being in the process of moving, all my books are still packed. I'm intrigued by it - I shan't read others' comments until I've finished it.

Thanks so much, VeganMedusa.

Claimed in the OZ VBB Round 12. I hope the next person enjoys it as much as I did. Happy travelling, strange but compelling book!

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

On its way again . . . happy travelling, well-travelled book.

Really looking forward to reading this after hearing so much about it. Even better that the actual book has travelled so extensively and been read by so many booklovers.
Thanks livrecache for offering through OZVBB!