Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

For about the first forty pages, I thought I might give up on this book, but after that slow start, it really picked up and I ended up enjoying it a lot.

In Veronika Decides to Die, Coelho uses the theme of insanity to create a discourse on life and living. His own time in an insane asylum informs the experiences of the characters in Villette, the Solvenian mental hospital where most of this story takes place. I appreciate the lack of “magic” in this book, and the limited mention of religion. Instead Coelho focuses on realistic people with realistic experiences, and thus I was able to sympathize and relate much more easily. It was less of a fantastical adventure (like The Alchemist, although I did like that book quite a bit) and more of an eloquent story. He does, as usual, have the tendency to tell just as much as he shows, but I think this novel is an impressive feat in that the story and its messages expand well beyond the limits of the setting.

There are way too many passages I liked, so here is just a sampling (about half):

Veronika knew that life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act. (p 4)

In adolescence she thought it was too early to choose; now, in young adulthood, she was convinced it was too late to change. (p 43)

“… 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 but incapable fo 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.” (p 62)

She had overcome her minor defects only to be defeated by matters of fundamental importance. She had managed to appear utterly independent when she was, in fact, desperately in need of company. … She gave all her friends the impression that she was a woman to be envied, and she expended most of her energy in trying to behave in accordance with the image she had created of herself.

Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn’t care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.

She might have impressed a lot of people with her strength and determination, but where had it left her? In the void. Utterly alone. In Villete. In the anteroom of death. (p 67)

She could almost touch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of masks, of appropriate behavior. (p 67-68)

Veronika hated everything, but mainly she hated the way she had lived her life, never bothering to discover the hundreds of other Veronikas who lived inside her and who were interesting, crazy, curious, brave, bold. (p 68)

The happier people can be, the unhappier they are. (p 77)

Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world no external threat can penetrate, build exaggeratedly high defenses against the outside world, against new people, new places, different experiences, and leave their inner world stripped bare. It is there that bitterness begins its irrevocable work. (p 90)

Both heroes and madmen are indifferent to danger and will forge ahead regardless of what other people say. (p 91)

But human beings are like that, she thought. We’ve replaced nearly all our emotions with fear. (p 110)

“We’re allowed to make a lot of mistakes in our lives,” said her colleague, “except the mistake that destroys us.”

They spent nights, weeks, and years talking, never accepting the fact that, good or bad, an idea only exists when someone tries to put it into practice. (p 149)

“Am I cured?”

“No. You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness.” (p 169)

“‘Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains.’” (p 198)