Each moment in our lives is worth living, is what Paulo Coelho conveys in Veronika Decides to Die. Differently written from his more famous novel ’The Alchemist’, this touching, often amusing and very thought provoking work is by no means inferior.
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An attempted suicide and its repercussions
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Veronika has no plausible excuse to commit suicide yet, she is dissatisfied, and argues that everything is good now, but will go downhill.
She fails her suicide and is admitted to a mental institution where she is informed that she has only a week to live, as heart is now fragile due to her sleeping pill overdose.
The story traces her last seven days condemned to be spent in the company of the mad, while she exasperatedly awaits death.
She encounters a motley of ‘mad’ people. Zedka, the depressed failed lover who deliberately embraces misery. Mari, the successful lawyer prone to panic attacks. Eduard, the schizophrenic with visions of paradise, whose ambitious parents quashed his desires to be an artiste.
Among them, Veronika notices the privileges of being mad. Of not needing to be true on others’ expectations, of doing one’s own things without people pointing fingers at you because you are ‘mad’ after all.
In her last few days she indulges in all that she had deprived herself of, like playing the piano, her desires, openly displaying hurt, anger, love and frustrations that she kept bottled inside for her 24 years. Veronika now sheds her inhibitions, negativities, complexes, and feels a by now futile wish to live again.
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Coelho states, ’’An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely.’’
Marvel at the remarkably flimsy reasons Veronika offers for her suicide attempt, all important and intelligent according to her. Veronika smacks of pessimism, a defeatist mentality and a huge fear of rejection or failure. One can’t help feel sorry for the warped, confused and also selfish Veronika. (’’Suicide demands that people think of themselves first and then of others.’’)
The novel both glorifies suicide giving romantic ideas about it and also condemns it. In course, Coelho touches on aspects like the misuse of mental health institutions, the horrors of electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shocks, the problem of readjustment in the outside world after treatment in a mental institution, the growing cases of stress, tedium, depression, loneliness, rejection, and despair. Coelho also urges readers to overcome such feelings and live!
Coelho shows how people build walls around themselves to portray to the world their strength while being very weak inside. Here he drips sarcasm. He encourages readers to look within to find our different selves we have hidden from ourselves, who have different characteristics from what we portray to the world. Search for the sad, depressed Veronika’s within ourselves encourage them to flourish with a better approach to life.
What does it mean to be mad questions Coelho. Anyone who lives in their own world, doing things away from the norm is mad. Madness need not be negative. Einstein, Beatles, Christopher Columbus could be considered mad. Be ‘mad’ like them to exercise options that are considered risky, as some people find true happiness in being ‘mad’.
Man struggles to survive, not to succumb is the core message of the novel. “Live our life considering each day as a miracle, considering the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existence.”
A must!