Everyone has to read this book at least once. I have it on audio and listen to it quite often.

Excellent read. Entertaining, sad, sexy. Great summertime, beach book.

A great gift for a woman who is dealing with dealing with depression, extremely helpful and strangely comforting.

My favourite quote from the book: "The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta." Hemingway's description of the fiesta is euphoric. Maybe that's what euphoria is all about - feeling as if consequences have no place. To be high. I've felt this way on just a handful of (sober) occasions: Burning Man, scuba diving for the first time, fly fishing when the river comes alive with fish taking. These are the experiences I long for but so rarely experience.

Great book. I haven't read any Hemingway in years. His writing is so crisp and deliberate yet at times flows so beautifully and effortlessly. His description of the scenery during Jake and Bill's fly fishing trip is especially memorable.

Not that I expected a Hemingway novel to be cheerful, but I found this book to be more depressing than his other stories I've read. At least in the Spanish Civil War or World War II, there was a purpose to the sadness. In this one, there's just the floating and emptiness of people who don't have to work, don't have to be anywhere, and have nowhere to go. They spend their time drinking and partying and sleeping with one another. The connections they form are superficial and they do nothing productive. Their lack of focus is what made the book so depressing. As all his books are, beautiful and depressing.

A brilliant masterpiece of impotence, masculinity, femininity, the great war, and everything else we literature people like to talk about. All the characters are tragic in their own way and the vibrant backgrounds they move against are perfect for a story about expatriates and bull fighting (very loosely and superficially of course).

The story-telling technique was interesting- always "we" for the boys, the observers.
But the story seemed totally strange. The girls are so weird, odd behavior, but not what I see with people who are depressed or suicidal. I'm not sure if it really glorifies suicide- it certainly glorifies the girls. At the end, there's some expression of the loss and confusion, but I couldn't really feel for the family. The characters, especially the girls, were described only through the lens of the boys and so come off as a bit flat (intentional?) They're not really characters at all, but fantasies for the boys.

Finished September 29, 2006

Amazing book, sad, nostalgic. Written from the perspective of adolescent boys (third person plural) as they observe their neighbors the Lisbon girls, by whom they are all captivated. The five girls in the family all end up attempting/committing suicide as they are practically held prisoner by a controlling mother. Gorgeous writing (which is to be expected of a Pulitzer winning author, I suppose).

p. 4 - "Mrs. Scheer, who lives down the street, told us she saw Cecilia the day before she attempted suicide. She was standing by the curb, in the antique wedding dress with the shorn hem she always wore, looking at a Thunderbird encased in fruit flies."

p. 18-19 - "Mr. Buell had been a pilot in the Second World War. Shot down over Burma, he led his men on a hundred-mile hike through the jungle to safety. He never accepted any kind of medicine after that, not even aspirin. One winter he broe his shoulder skiing, and could only be convinced to get an X-ray, nothing more. From that time on he winced when we tried to tackle him, and raked leaves one-handed, and no longer flipped daredeveil pancakes on Sunday mornings. Otherwise he persevered, and always gently corrected us when we took the Lord's name in vain. In his bedroom, the shoulder had fused into a graceful humpback. 'It's sad to think about those girls,' he said. 'What a waste of life.' "

p. 22 - "Sweaty, shirtless, and tattoed, he walked right into the kitchen where the Lisbon girls lived and breathed, but we never asked him what he saw because we were scared of his muscles and his poverty."

p. 26-27 - "Cecilia was wearing, as usual, the wedding dress with the shorn hem. The dress was vintage 1920s. It had sequins on the bust she didn't fill out, and someone, either Cecilia herself or the owner of the used clothing store, had cut off the bottom of the dress with a jagged stroke so that it ended above Cecilia's chafed knees. She sat on a barstool, staring into her punch glass, and the shapeless bag of a dress fell over her. She had colored her lips with red crayon, which gave her face a deranged harlot look, but she acted as though no one were there."

p. 29 - "She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand."

p. 34-35 - "By this time it was nearly nine o'clock. From the roof of Chase Buell's house where we congregated after getting out of our dress-up clothes to watch what would happen next, we could see, over the heaps of trees throwing themselves into the air, the abrupt demarcation where the trees ended and the city began. The sun was falling in the haze of distant factories, and in the adjoining slums the scatter of glass picked up the raw glow of the smoggy sunset. Sounds we usually couldn't hear reached us now that we were up high, and crouching on the tarred shingles, resting chins in hands, we made out, faintly, an indecipherable backward-playing tape of city life, cries and shouts, the barking of a chained dog, car horns, the voices of girls calling out numbers in an obscure tenacious game - sounds of the impoverished coity we never visisted, all mixed and muted, without sense, carried on a wind from that place. Then: darkness. Car lights moving in the distance. Up close, yellow house lights coming on, revealing families around televisions. One by one, we all went home."

p. 50 - "Already the house showed signs of uncleanliness, though they were nothing compared to what was to come later. Dust balls lined the steps. A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it."

p. 55 - "None of the Lisbons helped with the fence removal. From time to time, however, we saw their faces blinking at the windows. Just after the truck pulled the fence free, Mr. Lisbon himself came out the side door and coiled up a garden hose. He didn't move to the trench. He raised one hand in a neighborly salute and returned inside. The man lashed the fence, in sections, to his truck and - getting paid for it - gave Mr. Bates the worst lawn job we'd ever seen. We were amazed our parents permitted this, when lawn jobs weren't usually justified called the cops. But now Mr. Bates didn't scream or try to get the truck's license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips - they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawn.

p. 77-78 - "He didn't notice a single face as he took a seat. He saw neither teacher nor students, and was aware only of the heavenly light in the room, an orange glow from the autumnal foliage outside. The room seemed full of sweet viscous liquid, a honey nearly lgiht as air, which he breathed in. Time slowed down, and in his left ear the ringing of the cosmic Om started up clear as a telephone. When we suggested these details had been laced with the same THC in his blood, Trip Fontaine thrust a finger into the air, the only time his hands stopped shaking during the entire interview. 'I know what it's like to be high,' he said. 'This was different.' In the orange light the students' heads looked like sea anemones, undulating quietly, and the silence of the room was that of the ocean floor. 'Every second is eternal,' Trip told us, describing how as he sat in his desk the girl in front of him, for no apparent reason, had turned around and looked at him. He couldn't say she was beautiful because all he could see where his eyes. The rest of her face - the pulpy lips, the blond sideburn fuzz, the nose with its candy-pink translucent nostrils - registered dimly as the two blue eyes lifted him on a sea wave and held him suspended. 'She was the still point of the turning world,' he told us, quoting Eliot, whose Collected Poems he had found on the shelf of the detoxicification center. For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health waster. 'You never know what'll set the memory off,' he told us. 'A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything.' "

p. 158 - "In the bathtub, cooking in the broth of her own blood, Cecilia had released an airborne virus which the other girls, even in coming to save her, had contracted. No one cared how Cecilia had caught the virus in the first place. Transmission became explanation. The other girls, safe in their own rooms, had smelled something strange, sniffed the air, but ignored it. Black tendrils of smoke had crept under their doors, rising up behind their studious backs to form the evil shapes smoke or shadow take on in cartoons: a black-hatted assassion brandishing a dagger; an anvil about to drop. Contagious suicide made it palpable. Spiky bacteria lodged in the agar of the girls' throats. In the morning, a soft oral thrush had sprouted over their tonsils. The girls felt sluggish. At the window the world's light seemed dimmed. They rubbed their eyes to no avail. They felt heavy, slow-witted. Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason. When we thought of the girls along these lines, it was as feverish creatures, exhaling soupy breath, succumbing day by day in their isolated ward. We went outside with our hair wet in the hopes of catching flu ourselves so that we might share their delirium."

p. 170-171 - "We'd like to tell you with authoriy what it was like inside the Lisbon house, or what the girls felt being imprisoned in it. Sometimes, drained by this in investigation, we long for some shred of evidence, some Rosetta stone that would explain the girls at last. But even though that winter was certainly not a happy one, little more can be averred. Trying to locate the girls' exact pain is like the self-examination doctors urge us to make (we've reached that age). On a regular basis, we're forced to explore with clinical detachment our most private pouch and, pressing it, impress ourselves with its anatomical reality: two turtle eggs bedded in a nest of tiny sea grapes, with tubes snaking in and out, knobbed with nodules of gristle. We're asked to find in this dimly mapped place, amid naturally occurring clots and coils, upstart invaders. We never realized how many bumps we had until we went looking. And so we lie on our backs, probing, recoiling, probing again, and the seeds of death get lost in the mess God made us.

It's no differnet with the girls. Hardly have we begun to palpate their grief than we find ourselves wondering whether this particular wound was mortal or not, or whether (in our blind doctoring) it's a wound at all. It might just as well be a mouth, which is as wet and as warm. The scar might be over the heart or the kneecap. We can't tell. All we can do is go groping up the legs and arms, over the soft bivalvular torso, to the imagined face. It is speaking to us. But we can't hear."

p. 174-175 - "In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life. She couldn't understand how the Lisbons kept so quiet, why they didn't wail to heaven or go mad. Seeing Mr. Lisbon stringing Christmas lights, she shook her head and muttered. She let go of the special geriatric banister installed along the first floor, took a few steps at sea level without support, and for the first time in seven years suffered no pain. Demo explained it to us like this: 'We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it - that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.' "

p. 235 - "Like everyone else, we went to Alice O'Connor's coming-out party to forget about the Lisbon girls. The black bartenders in red vests served us alcohol without asking for I.D., and in turn, around 3 a.m., we said nothing when we saw them loading leftover cases of whiskey into the trunk of a sagging Cadillac. Inside, we got to know girls who had never considered taking their own lives. We fed them drinks, danced with them until they became unsteady, and led them out to the screened-in veranda. They lost their high heels on the way, kissed us in the humid darkness, and then slipped away to throw up demurely in the outside bushes. Some of us held their heads as they vomited, then let them rinse their mouths with beer, after which we got back to kissing them again. The girls were mostrous in their formal dresses, each built around a wire cage. Pounds of hair were secured atop their heads. Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived - bound, in other words, for life."

p. 243-245 - "Everyone we spoke to dated the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls. Though at first people blamed them, gradually a sea change took place, so that the girls were seen not as scapegoats bu as seers. More and more, people forget about the individual reasons why the girls may have killed themselves, the stress disorders and insufficient neurotransmitters, and instead put the deaths down to the girls' foresight in predicting decadence. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, the continuing decline of our auto industry. This transformation in thinking went largely unnoticed, however, because we rarely ran into one another anymore. Without trees, there were no leaves to rake, no piles of leaves to burn. Winter snows continued to disappoint. We had no Lisbon girls to spy on. Now and then, of course, as we were slowly carted into the melancholic remainder of our lives (a place the Lisbon girls, wisely, it began to seem, never cared to see), we would stop, mostly alone, to gaze up at the whited sepulchre of the former Lisbon house.

The Lisbon girls made suicide familiar. Later, when other acquaintances chose to end their lives - sometimes even borrowing a book the day before - we always pictured them as taking off cumbersome boots to enter the highly associative mustiness of a family cottage on a dune overlooking the sea. Every one of them had read the signs of misery Old Mrs. Karafilis had written, in Greek, in the clouds. On different paths, with different colored eyes or jerkings of the head, they had deciphered the secret to cowardive or bravery, whichever it was. And the Lisbon girls were always before them. They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws."

p. 248-249 - "But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up in precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice flow, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out of hearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."

I guess the main idea is that people used to have these giant ecstatic rituals that bond people together and made everybody happy. In our staid first-world culture, these rituals were once common but became looked down upon as primitive.
While historically interesting and food for thought, I found it to be so unscientific, especially the evolution parts, that it was a bit obnoxious. Story-telling is fine, but without data it remains a story.
I also found the judgments about our modern culture to be a bit old and trite. How can she say that we don't have common ecstatic rituals and not really discuss burning man?