The Virgin Suicides

a commentary on an incomparable book

“In this dark, there will be light. Will you help us?”

The Virgin Suicides is a book I’ve longed to read for a long, long time. However, it was now, in the end of December during the summer times (in my country) that I decided to put my hands on it and devour it once and for all.

There are few book that can grasp me so strongly such as this. Pages flowed faster than the fastest river, page after page after page and I did not see them ending and beginning. I saw only, felt only, the Lisbon girls and their tragedy.

Tragedy? Oh yes, of course. There’s no other word for it. The deepest of tragedies, the slow rotting of five beautiful girls, devoured away by the world and their family. Devoured by their nation and by their own shared collective madness.

Not a disease that was released after Cecilia's suicide, but a disease that was born, is born, in every single person, that the Lisbon girls knew deeply and so very well, and that they were able to shape according to their desires and feelings. They were capable of doing what they wanted with the disease, they played with it, like none of us can.

I mean the disease of life, of course.

Young they were, but not naive in any sense. Life showed itself to them early in human years, but perhaps for them each day felt as eternity. We will never know.

If a reader says it understands and knows for sure and absolutely why they killed themselves, the reader is for sure mistaken. We can understand only bits and bits, and more than that, we must let them keep their secret, must let them keep their treasures and their knowledge that none of us will never posses.

It is always interesting to read books in which the past is retold with the knowledge of the future. Just like we can find in the narrative of Richard Papen in the Secret History, the past is retold with caution and a melancholic look of a person who knows where each step is bound to inevitably take the characters, where each word and move starts to slowly make sense after being seen again and again and again.

In The Virgin Suicides, even though we have narrators telling us of the past, they hope to make sense of things just as we do. We can only interpret what the boys tell us, without, just as them, ever being able to understand fully the minds and the thoughts of the sisters. Forever watching them from far away, clinging together to strings of truths. A piece of paper, a word once whispered, a memory left behind.

But it is inevitable to say that something was in them way before the last four Lisbon sisters killed themselves. They were what they were since before Cecilia. Five girls that knew the disease of the world and played with it in their bathtub, brushing each others hair and giggling about it while painting their nails.

In the end, even though I could write for hours and hours about this book, the final thoughts and feelings towards it do not change. I was obsessed about if from beginning to end, and I felt so completely surrounded by the Lisbon sisters and their energy I almost felt I knew them, even though I know I cannot ever hope to.

I am undoubtedly gonna think about this story and this characters for a long time, and they are forever gonna stay with me.

-Antônia D. G. Lau