In my quest to conquer the 1001 Books You Have to Read Before You Die list, I picked a book by
one of my favorite authors to kick-off my “summer break” reading to-do’s: Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho.
Coelho is the internationally acclaimed author of The Alchemist, a beautiful fiction on the meaning of life and
finding one’s true purpose. As an aside, I’m still a little perplexed as to why
it is no longer on the 1001 booklist
(apparently the world’s leading literary critics no longer think reading The Alchemist is something you should do
before you die), but that’s the topic of another post.
In Veronika Decides to
Die, Coelho explores his personal experiences and questions about finding
the meaning of one’s life in the context of a struggle for good mental health,
and furthermore he tries to uncover what it truly means to be “crazy” and why
we are all so afraid of that term. Veronika is a young, beautiful woman living
in Slovenia leading a life that is otherwise completely normal and mundane,
which is ultimately the underlying reason for her failed suicide attempt at the
book’s opening. Unfortunately swallowing a bottle of tranquilizers is not
enough to snuff out the inner drive she has (though she doesn’t know it yet) to
live a full, enriched life – she wakes to find herself in the country’s
somewhat infamous foremost mental institution, Villete. Soon after realizing
that her attempt on her life was a failure, she learns that, despite her revival,
she suffered irreversible damage to her heart, which will ultimately stop
beating within the next week. Over the course of the following days, Veronika’s
interactions with the patient’s of Villete, as well as the staff ignite in her
the will to live, an understanding and love for herself that she never
previously knew, and the drive to enjoy the life she once lead that was
seemingly unremarkable and now full of potential.
Coelho gives the reader the opportunity to experience first
hand the psychology of characters suffering from various psychiatric disorders
including major depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Through their stories
written from an omnipotent narrator, Coelho hopes to inspire the reader to look
at themselves and other from a new vantage point, and to ask ourselves what
exactly is the meaning of insanity. To Coelho, who spent 3 years
institutionalized due to his parent’s belief that he was “different” (when in
fact he was merely searching for his true vocation in life, which happened to
be in the field of art), “Insanity is the
inability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country,
able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable
of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't
understand the language they speak there. We've all felt that. And all of us,
one way or another, are insane.”
On the whole, Veronika
Decides to Die gets a 3/5 from me, and it is definitely worthy of its place
on the 1001 list. The characters are
very relatable and inspire compassion from the reader, whether or not you have
been diagnosed with a mental health illness or you have ever found yourself
feeling “insane.” As someone with a vested interest in improving mental health,
I absolutely recommend this book. Part of the problem with our current society
with regard to mental health is a underlying fear and ignorance that renders
individuals who suffer from any mental health problem to be socially
ostracized, feeling ashamed of their illness which often leads to lack of care
and treatment. Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, substance abuse,
post-traumatic stress – they are all illnesses, and they are all treatable.
Just like Diabetes or Hypertension, mental illnesses have an underlying pathogenesis
that includes genetics, environmental exposure, and social factors. Our fear of
mental illness is a matter of ignorance, and it almost seems by choice. It is
much easier to reject what you don’t understand then to step outside yourself
and attempt to analyze a situation or a person that seems foreign to you. Veronika Decides to Die is an exercise
in understanding others, their experience, the emotions, and the psyche.
Quotes:
"People never learn anything by
being told, they have to find out for themselves."
"Be crazy! But learn how to be
crazy without being the center of attention. Be brave enough to live
different."
"If one day I could get out of
here, I would allow myself to be crazy. Everyone is indeed crazy, but the
craziest are the ones who don't know they're crazy; they just keep repeating
what others tell them to."
"You are someone who is different,
but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious
illness. God chose you to be different. Why are you disappointing God with this
kind of attitude?"
"Be like the fountain that
overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains."
"I want to continue being crazy;
living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people want it to
be."
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