6/11/2023 0 Comments Veronika decides to die reviewShe meets fellow patients Zedka, who is suffering from chronic depression, Eduard the schizophrenic, and Mari, a lawyer plagued by panic attacks. Veronika ends up in the Villete, the infamous Slovenian mental asylum. The reasoning she leaves behind for others is that it was extremely saddening for her that an ignorant French journalist had begun an article with the rather disconcerting words: ‘Where is Slovenia?’ The reasoning she gives herself for this drastic act was life was the same for her every day lack of major emotional upheavals had become mundane for her. The narrative begins with Veronika, an attractive 24-year old Slovene musing on her life just after she swallows sleeping pills in an attempt to commit suicide. To put it bluntly, in the words of one of the characters, ‘And all of us, in one way or another, are mad.’ That, of course, puts Einstein, Columbus, even Edmund Hillary and the Beetles on the list of madmen. Madness is living in a separate world that you create yourself, a world others consider ‘different’. We all seem to have perverted ideas on what madness is, but Coelho’s book provides the simple answer: Madness is creating our own world and choosing to live in it, without concern about other things that do not matter. The fundamental question that Coelho puts forth is on what madness actually is. In Veronika decides to Die, the extremely masterful Paulo Coelho does what he is best at: forcing us to ponder upon things we all know, and making us see them in a whole new light.
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