I am not a fan of Paulo Coelho’s writing, but this book managed to leave an impression on me. I randomly picked it up on a summer vacation not expecting much of it and didn’t put it down till I was done with it the next day. And it was perfectly suited for a vacation indeed, a fun, insightful, quick read. I’d say it’s the best of Coelho’s books so far.
In his novel, ‘Veronika Decides to Die’, Paulo Coelho tackles mental illness, suicide, and society’s perspective on them through the story of Veronika, a young healthy woman, who attempts suicide out of lack of interest in life. Not that she had a particularly ‘bad’ life, but she simply couldn’t see it getting better at any point. She was tired of going through the boring motions of her everyday life, so she decided to break the cycle. Thing is, Veronika’s attempt fails and she finds herself in an asylum for the mentally ill among people who were defined by the society to be ‘insane’. In the asylum, she gets told that her heart was irreparably damaged in the process and that she has less than a week to live. With that knowledge, and given the new perspective she gains from the people she meets there, she starts to rediscover the will to live, revisit abandoned dreams, relearn to love and tries to make most of the few days she has left.
I would recommend this one for the way it explored the concept of insanity as perceived by society and the unique perspective it offered. It’s a thought-provoking and fun read.
“Anyone who lives in her own world is crazy. Like schizophrenics, psychopaths, maniacs. I mean people who are different from others.
‘Like you?’
‘On the other hand,’ Zedka continued, pretending not to have heard the remark, ‘you have Einstein, saying that there was no time or space, just a combination of the two. Or Columbus, insisting that on the other side of the world lay not an abyss but a continent. Or Edmund Hillary, convinced that a man could reach the top of Everest. Or the Beatles, who created an entirely different sort of music and dressed like people from another time. Those people–and thousands of others–all lived in their own world.”
― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
A Bookworm's Ramblings 