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.
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (via beautyisanillusion)

(via beautyisanillusion)

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Oscar Picks

Q. You picked “Tree of Life” for best film, director and cinematography. Sounds as if it made an impact.

A. It’s unquestionably the most original film made this year. Terrence Malick has been an interesting director throughout his entire career and this last film, I know there’s been divided opinion about it, but I thought it was so courageous.

My wife made a point about that movie that I think was really valid, which is that Malick manages to depict memory visually in a way that has never been done. Usually in movies, there is a narrative flashback. It’s coherent. But in “Tree of Life,” they don’t really make sense dramatically or narratively. They diffuse a kind of emotion in the viewer and it works as an actual memory does.

Little by little, I found myself watching that movie as I did as a young person, at 19 or 20, being completely blown away. And I hadn’t had that experience, that someone was making a movie just for the artfulness of it. I found it refreshing and it made me happy to be in the presence of that movie.

Q. And in the presence of dinosaurs?

A. I found that section to be incredibly courageous and strange and I like that. Some people said those sections seemed like an Imax movie. But I wasn’t really bothered by that. I went with it.

Q. Your novel “The Virgin Suicides” is another memory-based story.

A. Yes, but there were no dinosaurs.

Read on…

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Favorite Books of All Time

  • The Aeneid, Virgil
  • Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
  • Middlemarch, George Eliot
  • Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  • The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
  • Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  • Herzog, Saul Bellow
  • Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
  • The Boys of my Youth, JoAnne Beard

Flavorwire also rounds up lists by Jennifer Egan, Zadie Smith, and more…

And the finalists are…

We are thrilled to announce the following FSG books have been named finalists for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (Fiction)

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan (Nonfiction)

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos (Criticism)

The Chameleon Couch by Yusef Komunyakaa (Poetry)

I began this book already feeling a little sorry for myself as a contemporary writer, because it seemed to me the great subject of the novel was marriage and had been marriage from Jane Austen through Tolstoy and all the great 19th century writers like Henry James. And we’re not able to utilize the marriage plot anymore. Some people get to do it: Vikram Seth gets to do it because he’ll write about a traditional family in India and he’ll write “A Suitable Boy.” So I was feeling sorry for myself that I couldn’t do that, but I began playing around with the idea, and I realized I was right. It’s impossible for a contemporary writer to write a marriage plot now. It just doesn’t exist. Women are freer now, you can get divorced easily, you can get a prenup. If Isabel Archer could’ve gotten a prenup, she wouldn’t have had any problems with Gilbert Osmond.
Jeffrey Eugenides on The Marriage Plot
“Like a lot of young writers, when I started out, I had a dim conception of my material. I wrote about people and places that were vastly separated from those I knew. Then, too, if I tried to write about my own self, the results were far from illuminating, for the simple reason that I didn’t understand myself too well. As soon as I began writing The Virgin Suicides, however, I suddenly realized that I knew a lot, not about my own psychological dimensions so much but about the town where I grew up. I knew everything about the people who lived on our old street. I remembered their oddities and family histories, the rumors and gossip, and I remembered the weather, the local legends, the racial tensions, the flora and fauna. I stopped being embarrassed about being from a suburb in the Midwest. I treated it like my own Yoknapatawpha County and, for the first time, produced something that interested adult readers.” -Jeffrey Eugenides in The Paris Review

“Like a lot of young writers, when I started out, I had a dim conception of my material. I wrote about people and places that were vastly separated from those I knew. Then, too, if I tried to write about my own self, the results were far from illuminating, for the simple reason that I didn’t understand myself too well. As soon as I began writing The Virgin Suicides, however, I suddenly realized that I knew a lot, not about my own psychological dimensions so much but about the town where I grew up. I knew everything about the people who lived on our old street. I remembered their oddities and family histories, the rumors and gossip, and I remembered the weather, the local legends, the racial tensions, the flora and fauna. I stopped being embarrassed about being from a suburb in the Midwest. I treated it like my own Yoknapatawpha County and, for the first time, produced something that interested adult readers.”

-Jeffrey Eugenides in The Paris Review