VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE
”Stay mad, but behave like normal people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do that without attracting attention.”
Death – the absolute truth, the inevitable reality. At some stage in each of our lives, the choice of ending it has crossed our minds .The ultimate escape from all of this pain and agony, the undisturbed sleep. But none of us has ever dared to attempt it or even mention it as we all are afraid of the raised eyebrows and the imminent question, “are you mad?”
Madness – the excuse to finally live our lives, do as we want, no strings attached. Each one of us comes with our own set of eccentricities but we again are too afraid to express them and act on them. Again our feet are bound by the dreaded question, “are you mad?”
It’s said that all in life is pre decided by some supernatural power. But what happens if we decide to make our destiny. What happens if we decide to die?
The story begins on 11th November 1997, in Slovenia, the day Veronika decides that now the day has arrived for her to kill herself. She takes an overdose of sleeping pills to put herself out of her desolation. This decision was based on her belief that she had spent her life to the full extent and to carry on living will only increase her miseries. She decides to die because she was neither happy nor unhappy. It was the same routine for her, same working days and nights. She realizes that now nothing was going to change for her and life somehow had lost its meaning. As she awaits her death she watches the routine life from her window and feels at peace with her decision. While flipping through the pages of a magazine, a question asked in an article catches her eyes, where’s Slovenia? So she decides to write a letter to the newspaper, about Slovenia explaining its existence and making its anonymity, the reason of her death.
Her failed attempt leads her to a mental asylum called Vilette. As she regains consciousness, she realizes that her suicide had not been successful and after recovering she would have to go back to her routine life and live it on the terms of others, spend it for pleasing all and meeting their expectations. But later she is told that although she is alive, her heart is now irreparably damaged and she has only a few days to live. Waiting for her death to come, she realizes that time has lost all meaning. All she had to do was wait for the day, the minute and the second when she will finally close her eyes on this world.
During her first conscious night in the asylum, she meets Zedka, another inmate who had left everything in her life to search for her impossible love. Her futile search led to depression and finally she landed in the asylum. She experiences astral journeys during the course of her treatment and explores the world around herself in a way that was strange by all standards. She becomes a friend to Veronika and on the day of her release, she leaves her with the thoughts of limitless and reasonless love. Zedka decides to leave her depression in the asylum but carries with her all other sorts of madness which now will be normal for her and others, as she was considered to be abnormal.
Veronika also meets Mari, a member of the Fraternity (a group of longer standing members, who could have left several years ago, but stay at the states expenses due to the hospitals familiarity, and who behave like dangerous maniacs whenever there is a government inspection). Mari, a successful lawyer, enters the asylum as a panic attack patient. Though her state is completely curable, she decides to stay back and conform to the rules and life of the asylum rather than facing the world outside which had shunned her due to her illness. She teaches Veronika to experience ultimate pleasure and push herself beyond her boundaries. To be your own self is the best way to live and this can only happen when we remain true and not let others adulterate us. In the end, inspired by Veronika’s courage to live each day as it comes, Mari decides to leave the asylum and follow her heart and free her soul.
Veronika’s life changes when she meets Eduard, a schizophrenic, whose madness was reportedly beyond cure. Being the son of a diplomat, he had seen all comforts in life but his road accident changes his life .He gets inspired by the lives of great visionaries and creates his own visions of paradise. He gets conflicted between his parents’ wishes of him becoming a diplomat and his own of becoming a painter. Split between the two, he finally looses the thread of attachment and ends up in the asylum. Here, he gets enchanted by the music that Veronika creates on the piano. Each night he waits for her to play and looses all his sorrows and worries in the rhythm of the notes. She manages to free him when she bares herself and her innermost desires to him and he sets them both free by escaping the asylum and embracing love.
This is a short novel of about 190 pages, but each page is an excerpt from each of our existences. Any minor deviations from the societal norms, brands us as abnormal. The book shows us two sides of the coin: surrender to the society’s perception of our conduct, or struggle against that majority and try to find our own way in the world. To unlock our deepest desires and to live life the way we want, has somehow lost its meaning. By digging deep in our souls we only realize bitterness , hatred, love, madness .But what rules us is the fear to express what we feel .The book makes us realize life has not stopped offering changes but what we do with those changes , affect us. Closing our eyes from doing anything that’s different, that can change our life, guarding ourselves inside the high defensive walls will not help the cause. There’s an immediate need to break free from the shadows of monotony, normal and slow death. Each lesson in our life comes from our own experiences and they can only happen if we let them. Otherwise life just stagnates.
The book takes us through the risks taken by each of the characters. Life becomes worth living when we experiment with our capacity and capability. Love is the biggest risk that humans take. To completely surrender oneself to someone, tests all our other emotions. Selfless love is the impossible bond that all of us seek but rarely any of us find. But that does not stop us from loving as to feel alive we need to breath and bleed.
The knowledge of death inspires us to live each day with much enthusiasm and contentment. Otherwise we take each moment for granted and never pause to think that maybe this will be our last. We live for tomorrow and not for today. We stop realizing that we are judged by the standards of people who themselves do things which are way off the mark but manage to hide them. Each day is a miracle when we consider the number of things that can happen to us in each second of our fragile existence.
The author successfully manages to leave a mark on the hearts of all the people who ever decided what Veronica had, who ever felt like her, or like any of the other characters in Villete.
Insanity, as all call it, becomes a very relative term when we apply it to us humans. Our actions which may appear insane to someone, maybe completely justified to someone else. We need to realize that it’s perfectly fine to not behave as others expect us to and do what our heart tells us. It’s a very short life and we need to live it to the fullest, without any inhibitions.
About the author:
Paulo Coelho was born in Brazil and has become one of the most widely read authors in the world today. He is renowned for his novel “The Alchemist”, and is the recipient of numerous international awards. He was confined to a mental hospital in Rio de Janeiro three times during his teenage years. When he left, for the last time in 1967, Paulo promised himself that one day he would write about his experiences; however he also promised himself not to do this during his parent’s lifetime out of respect for the pain and suffering this would cause them. Instead Paulo found a way to release his experiences by way of the novel “Veronika decides to die”, published by Harper Collins in 1999.
