Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho
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A young woman, with a bright future and a long life attempts to commit suicide in Paulo Coelhos Veronika Decides to Die. She wakes in the Villete Mental Hospital where she is told she has one week to live due to the damage the suicide attempt has had on her heart. What follows is the authors look at sanity, life and happiness.
The story follows a predictable path that has been shown in all too many television programs and films. The person disgruntled with life is given a second chance to live their life when faced with death and the elements of life that they will be missing. An inward struggle against themselves that causes them to face an end with blinders on, and a situation that forces them to remove the blinders and face life and all that it truly is. Coelho telegraphs the ending at several points in the story, a fact that dilutes the message that he is trying to convey. At one point, after Veronika has had an apparent heart attack, Dr. Igor is examining her and states that she could “live to be a hundred.” That statement is made before the half way point in the story. With this point, the reader is forced to see the events that Coelho is trying to put off for at least one hundred more pages.
Another of the more disturbing elements of the book is the unnecessary introduction of Mari. An older Slovene, Mari suffers from panic attacks, her husband has divorced her while in Villete, and she has suffered a setback in her career by being institutionalized and ruining her professional image among her colleagues who no longer wish to have her in their law firm. If Veronika is Forrest Gump, Mari serves as the Lt. Dan character. Through all of Veronikas hard lessons and pain, Maris own life is re-affirmed. Like Lt. Dan who only wished for escape, but eventually returns with life renewed, Mari learns from Veronika to live her life with whatever comes her way and not to try and hold back her life, but to experience every moment of it. Mari makes the most insightful comment of the book, a point which could have been made several chapters ahead of time. In a quote from an unknown English poet, Mari wrote “Be like the fountain that overflows, not the cistern that merely contains.” This quote is the ultimate message that Paulo Coelho is trying to express.
While overall I did not care for this story, I did enjoy the way the author built his characters, telling their stories from their own points of view, and by expressing the emotions from each that would not be evident if told from another persons view of them. It was an interesting way of bringing the characters closer to the reader without having to build upon their foundations in more and more chapters.
Also interesting was the amount of knowledge of mental institutions that Coelho brought to the story through his own personal experience. From a sociological perspective, it was fascinating