Reviews: Veronika Decides to Die

"Ai!" you exclaim with a voice heavy with the basic, Kenyan intonation. "Who, in their right mind, would decide to die?" Okay, hush now and let me tell you about Veronika, why she had decided to die, and why this is my favourite book.

Disclaimer: vivid, unsettling imagery is most likely to occur. Caveat lector.

Of course we cannot have a novel blog without having a book review, and today's is about a bestseller from the acclaimed author of The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho. The novel itself is about Veronika, a seemingly normal woman from the town of Ljubljana ( I cannot pronounce it either), the capital of Slovenia. She has security, which is what she thought she would ever need. She doesn't have a well paying job, but she is stable as a librarian. She doesn't have a mansion, but the nuns who let her stay in their convent charge her a meager rent as long as she adheres to their rules. She doesn't have a boyfriend or a fiance, but she is a beautiful woman and can have any man she wanted, and be in his bed at the end of the day. But Veronika, as simple and safe as she is, finds that the routine and normalcy of her daily activities has rendered her life irreversibly meaningless, and so she decides to take her own life.

What fascinates me most about her is the incredible amount of thought that went into this decision, including how she would do it. She had thought of hanging herself, cutting her wrists, or jumping off a building, but she thought them too graphic, too self-harming. She was worried for her parents, and did not want to have them brought in to identify an unrecognizable body as that of their daughter. Therefore, she acquired packets and packets of pills and took each one by one with a bottle of (I think) vodka, hoping that death would come for her silently and all at once, like falling asleep.

Of course her attempts fail and she wakes up rescued, but now in a mental institution called Villette. She is declared insane, and worse still, most likely to die in about a week because the pills had already made her heart weak. What disturbs Veronika most is not that she had tried to commit suicide, or that she had only six to seven days of life left, but that she would have to endure that much longer before her mission is completed.

While in the asylum, however, she unwittingly befriended a depressed lady and another who suffers from raging panic attacks, and fell in love with a schizophrenic. Yes, oh so romantic. It was magical reading about how her stay at the asylum turned her around. Being around mentally unstable people made her fear of being imperfect disappear, and she gradually transformed into the Veronika she had always wanted to be. She was flawed but happy. Unstable, yet fearless. Dying, yet more alive than she had ever been before.

She noticed the piano in the asylum's common room that was never played, and grew to love hearing its music produced by a stranger hidden by the night. She began valuing the presence of her fellow patients, loving them for who they were. She grew so much closer with her schizophrenic boyfriend that they ended up doing naughty stuff over the piano (sex... they had sex, to be more blunt). Her will to live returned, and just in time too for she learned that the aneurysm in her heart is... healed! Fate had allowed her to live and her doctor was pleased. He had finally ridden her of her suicidal tendencies, having conditioned her to live the rest of her days with fullness of joy.

Paulo Coelho explained that he wrote the novel from a personal point of view, since he, too, had once spent some time in an asylum, although I am not certain about the P.G. part. When he was younger and had told his parents that he wanted to be a writer, they thought him mad and had him admitted, hoping that the doctors would use whatever crude methods to exorcise the 'demon' out of him. I find it appalling how, even during our modern times, people would rather treat novelty as a disease that should be purged rather than trying to gain an understanding of it. I have witnessed this one too many times, and perhaps this might have been a contributing factor to my despondency. However, how Mr. Coelho writes about this, death, and a type of spiritual oppression, and how he transforms them into something relatable and redeemable is what inspired me to introduce similar themes into The Orisha Saga.

I must confess. The first time I read the novel was just as my depression had taken root. To make matters worse, it was only an online snippet of the book that ended with Veronika discovering that she had not succeeded. I was furious at that. I wanted to know what happened next. Did Veronika kick the bucket? Did she try it again, the act made more difficult now that she was constantly under watch? What about the Nuns? Did they carry out a full cleansing of her room, praying, humming, and wafting whatever new incense they had purchased to get rid of the unholy atmosphere? I was more tortured by not knowing what happened than I was by depression. In a way, the desire to find out the outcome gave me an unusual strength to keep pushing on; I needed to find the next chapters of that damned book. Eventually I did; of course I would, for I am awesome at finding things except my will to study or attend parties. And, despite my expectations of Veronika, I was happy with how Coelho let her story stretch on into eternity.

Now, back to the theme of Death.

Okay! Okay! Calm the heck down! I will not go into another rant about my past life. That is dead and gone, and I would not like to revisit it. But I must explain how death became a theme in my novel series.

I love Coelho's book because of one fundamental teaching: embrace your madness. The rest of the world is insane for trying to fit you into a certain box, but you are sane for you see that you cannot conform. The human spirit was never meant to settle and become obscure. It was meant to explore and experiment, to jump at the break of dawn and give thanks at the last light of day. Veronika's tale had made a screw come lose in my mind. "I am mad too, aren't I?" I realized, and I became nearly fearless. I took on roles that I never would have in a million years. I participated in a modelling contest for goodness sake (what was I thinking?). And I became increasingly interested in the aspect of death, but from a newer perspective.

I wanted to know the realities of Heaven.

What kind of Heaven would it be? Would it be the Christian heaven, the Muslim heaven, the Jewish heaven, the Buddhist heaven, Yoruba, Shinto, Aboriginal, Nordic... It had to be related to something. We can't have all these heavenly realms floating somewhere above our heads. But then I thought... 'What if they could all exist at once? ...Maybe not directly above our heads, but perhaps somewhere endlessly above us? What if Heaven is divided into continents just as our own Earth is? What if...? What if...?' And just like that, after eons and eons of dormancy, the wheels of my imagination turned.

But how does death play a part, you ask. Normally, people die then go to Heaven, don't they?

Normally.

Believe me, it was hectic tying all these together. There are heavenly realms beside our very own Earth. A hellish place must therefore exist. It was exhausting yet amazing to create the physical laws that would enable such spiritual dimensions to coexist. Death still had to occur, because it is what all believe in: the eventuality of life. But what if that life does go on, but in another place? And how would one be able to return? Reincarnation? Resurrection? CPR? It took four years of plotting and the destruction of wayward stories, but it gave birth to something ethereal, something that aligns perfectly with the entirety of a majestic plot.

Before I end, I would like to pass a great thanks to my readers. I made a great revelation in my previous post explaining that I have suffered from depression before, and that it is a battle that still wages. Depression isn't a one time thing; once you feel it, it will keep coming back. However, a number of you reached out and this gave me such great joy. I knew not only that you were reading my blog, but also that my words resonate with you enough to take action, and for this I am forever grateful. You are the shining beam of a lighthouse within a terrifying sea storm, and it is because of people like you that I am alive.

For anyone out there going through something similar, I am here. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, and so I urge you to take that step and reach out to me if you want to talk.

Anyway, see you nerds later! I have a life I need to live.

P.S: Yes, I've modeled before. It was horrible.