topics: |  fiction | brazil | portuguese | fable

Twenty-four-year-old Veronika seems to have everything -- youth and beauty,
boyfriends and a loving family, a fulfilling job. But something is missing in
her life. So, one cold November morning Veronika decides to die. She takes a
handful of sleeping pills expecting never to wake up. But she does -- at a
mental hospital where she is told that she has only days to live.

This poignant international bestseller by the author of The Alchemist takes
readers on a quest to find meaning in a culture overshadowed by angst,
soulless routine, and pervasive conformity. Based on events in Coelho's own
life, Veronika Decides to Die questions the meaning of madness and celebrates
individuals who do not fit into patterns society considers to be normal. Bold
and illuminating, it is a dazzling portrait of a young woman at the
crossroads of despair and liberation, and a poetic, exuberant appreciation of
each day as a renewed opportunity.

QUOTES:

...at twenty-four, having experienced everything she could
experience -- and that was no small achievement -- Veronika was
almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she
had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion. - p.7

Veronika had decided to die on that lovely Ljubljana afternoon, with Bolivian
musicians playing in the square, with a young man passing by her window, and
she was happy with what her eyes could see and her ears hear. She was even
happier that she would not have to go on seeing those same things for another
thirty, forty, or fifty years, because they would lose all their originality
and be transformed into the tragedy of a life in which everything repeats
itself and where one day is exactly like another.  - p.9

Since I only took sleeping pills, I'm not disfigured in any way: I am still
young, pretty, intelligent, I won't have any difficulty in getting
boyfriends, I never did. I'll make love with them in their houses, or in the
woods, I'll feel a certain degree of pleasure, but the moment I reach orgasm,
the feeling of emptiness will return. The time will come to make our excuses
- 'It's late', or 'I have to get up early tomorrow.' - and we'll part as
quickly as possible, avoiding looking each other in the eye.  - p.19

My mother ... will recover ... and will keep asking me what I'm going to do
with my life, why I'm not the same as everyone else...
     One day, I'll get tired of hearing her constantly repeating the same
things and to please her I'll marry a man whom I oblige myself to love. He
and I will end up finding a way of dreaming of a future together: a house in
the country, children, our children's future. We'll make love often in the
first year, less in the second, and after the third year, people perhaps
think about sex once a fortnight and transform that thought into action once
a month. Even worse, we'll barely talk. I'll force myself to accept the
situation, and I'll wonder what's wrong with me, because he no longer takes
any interest in me, ignores me... When the marriage is about to fall apart,
I'll get pregnant. We'll have a child, feel closer to each other for a
while, and then the situation will go back to what it was before.
     I'll begin to put on weight... [will keep] creeping up regardless of
the controls I put on it. At that point... I'll have a few more children,
conceived during nights of love that pass all too quickly. I'll tell
everyone that the children are my reason for living, when in reality my life
is their reason for living.
     People will consider us a happy couple, and no one will know how much
solitude, bitterness and resignation lies beneath the surface happiness.
     Until one day, when my husband takes a lover for the first time, and I
will perhaps kick up a fuss ... [but] I'll be too old and cowardly, with two
or three children who need my help, ... I'll make a scene, I'll threaten to
leave and take the children with me. Like all men, my husband will back
down, he'll tell me he loves me and that it won't happen again. ... Two or
three years later, another woman will appear in his life. I'll find out --
but this time I'll pretend I don't know. I used up all my energy fighting
against that other lover, I've no energy left, it's best to accept life as
it really is, and not as I imagined it to be. My mother was right. ...
     Veronika made a promise to herself: she would not leave Villete
alive. It was best to put an end to everything now, while she was still
brave and healthy enough to die. - p.21-22
     [What is interesting in this narrative is that she never takes on a
     lover - its mostly the husband... ]

... a lot of people ... would talk about the horrors in other people's lives
as if they were genuinely concerned to help them, but the truth was that
they took pleasure in the suffering of others, because that made them
believe they were happy and that life had been generous with them. - p.25

She had always spent her life waiting for something: for her father to come
back from work, for the letter from a lover that never arrived, for her
end-of-year exams, for the train, the bus, the phone call, the holiday, the
end of the holidays. Now she was going to have to wait for death, which had
made an appointment with her. - p.27

artists were mad, because they led such strange, insecure lives, different
from the lives of normal people - p.29

A powerful wizard who wanted to destroy an entire
kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which all
the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go
mad.
    The following morning, the whole population drank
from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king
and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone,
and which the magician had not managed to poison. The
king was worried and tried to control the population by
issuing a series of edicts ... when the inhabitants heard
these decrees, they became convinced that the king had
gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. They
marched on the castle and called for his abdication.
    In despair, the king prepared to step down from the
throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: "Let us go and
drink from the communal well. Then, we will be the same
as them."
    And that's what they did: the king and queen drank
the water of madness and immediately began talking
nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the
king was displaying such wisdom, why not allow him to
continue ruling?  - story told by Zedka to Veronika in
Vilete p.30-31

[ USE?? POSTER?? ]
I want to continue being mad, living my life the way I dream it, and not the
way other people want it to be. - p.31

She had learned to give men a precise amount of pleasure, never more, never
less, only what was necessary. - p.40

When [the great Slovene poet France Pre\^seren] was thirty-four, he went
into a church and saw an adolescent girl, Julia Primic, with whom he fell
passionately in love. Like the ancient minstrels, he began to write her
poems ... that encounter inspired his finest poetry and created a whole
legend around his name.  In the small central square of Ljubljana, the
statue of the poet stares fixedly at something. If you follow his gaze, you
will see, on the other side of the square, the face of a woman carved into
the stone of one of the houses. That was where Julia had lived. Even after
death, Pre\^seren gazes for all eternity on his Impossible Love.
    And what if he had fought a little harder? - p.51
[Impossible love - contrast SeSher kabitA...]

Poets loved the full moon, they wrote thousands of poems about it, but it
was the new moon that Veronika loved best because there was still room for
it to grow, to expand, to fill the whole of its surface with light before
its inevitable decline.  - p.57

Then she started to feel hatred for the person she loved most in the world:
her mother. A wonderful wife who worked all day and washed the dishes at
night, sacrificing her own life...
    How can I hate someone who only ever gave me love? Thought Veronika,
confused, trying to check her feelings. But it was too late, her hatred had
been unleashed, she had opened her door to personal hell. She hated the love
she had been given, because it had asked for nothing in return, which was
absurd, unreal, against the laws of nature. - p.62
[This beautiful passage is about hatred -  Is experiencing it fully -
giving it free rein - one way to conquer it?? And what of the
role for music as an outlet or a channel
for the emotions? Eventually, Veronika loses her angst after banging the
piano into a jangling discord many times... and then the hatred leaves
her and she plays a sonata serenading the moon and the stars] - p.62

People only go mad when they try to escape from routine. ...  Can you
imagine a world in which, for example, we were not obliged to repeat the
same thing every day of our lives? If, for example, we all decided to eat
only when we were hungry, what would housewives and restaurants do?
    - Dr. Igor, p.71

    "You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is
reality?"
    "It's whatever the majority deems it to be. It's not necessarily the
best or the most logical, but its the one that has become adapted to the
deisires of society as a whole. You see this thing I've got around my neck?"
    "You mean your tie?"
    "Exactly. Your answer is the logical, coherent answer an
absolutely normal person would give: it's a tie! A madman, however,
would say that what I have round my neck is a ridiculous, useless bit
of coloured cloth tied in a very complicated way, which makes it
harder to get air into your lungs and difficult for you to turn your
neck. I have to be careful when I'm anywhere near a fan, or I could be
strangled by this bit of cloth. If a mad person were to ask me what
this tie is for, I would have to say, absolutely nothing. The only
useful function a tie serves is the sense of relief when you get home
and take it off; you feel as if you've freed yourself from something,
though quite what you don't know.
    If I were to ask a madman and a normal person what this is, the sane
person would say: a tie. It doesn't matter who's correct, what matters is
who's right." - p.79

[WOW!!! Use in graphic - vertical pic of tie - with running multi-size
courierfont text superimposed and xor-ed colours.
Also... think of "Drinking Mud" poem]

Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world which no external
threat can penetrate, build exaggeratedly high defences 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
inevitable work. ... [They become trapped in their own high walls]
	- p.80

[In a picture of the main square in summer 1910] There were all those
people, whose children and grandchildren had already died, frozen in one
particular moment of their lives. The women wore
voluminous dresses and the men were all wearing hat, jacket, gaiters, tie
... The temperature must have been what it would be today in summer,
thirty-five degrees in the shade. If an Englishman turned up in clothing
more suited to the heat - in Bermuda shorts and shirtsleeves - what would
those people think?
    'He must be mad.' - p.84

Though she had always felt loved and protected, there had been one missing
element that would have transformed that love into a blessing: she should
have allowed herself to be a little madder. - p.85

Veronika: "Why do you people spend your time thinking about [masturbation]?"
Mari: "It's the same outside; it's just that here we don't need to hide the
fact. " -p.91

That's how it should be with you: stay mad, but behave like normal
people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do so without
attracting attention. - p.92

laws had not been created to resolve problems, but in order to prolong
quarrels indefinitely.
    It's a shame  that [God] did not live in the world today, because if He
did, we would still be in Paradise, while He would be mired in appeals,
requests, injunctions, demands, preliminary verdicts, and would have to
justify to innumerable tribunals His decision to expel Adam and Eve from
Paradise for breaking an arbitrary rule with no foundation in law:
Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt no eat.
    If she were called upon to defend the couple, Mari would undoubtedly
accuse God of administrative negligence, because, as well as planning the
tree [in the midst of the garden and not outside the walls of Paradise],
he had failed to surround it with warnings and barriers, had failed to adopt
even minimal security arrangements, and had thus exposed everyone to
danger.
    Mari would also accuse him of inducement to criminal activity, for he
had pointed out to Adam and Eve the exact place where the tree was to
be found. ... He had devised a rule and then found a way of persuading
someone to break it, merely in order to invent Punishment. - p.97

The tangle of laws created such a confusion that the Son [of God]
ended up nailed to a cross. - p.101

"But human beings are like that," she said. "We've replaced
nearly all our emotions with fear."

[FINDING MEANING IN OUR LIVES: Mari used to be a lawyer.] She was tired of
struggling with bureaucracy and law suits, unable to help people who had
spent years of their lives trying to resolve problems not of their own
making. Working with the Red Cross though, she would see immediate results
[to help the poor of El Salvador]. - p.104

"You don't have any makeup on," said a trainee. "Do you want to
borrow some of mine?"

There are only two prohibitions, one according to man's law, the
other according to God's. Never force a sexual relationship on
anyone, because that is considered to be rape. And never have
sexual relations with children, because that is the worst of all
sins. Apart from that, you are free. There's always someone who
wants exactly what you want. - Mari, to V p. 123

when everyone dreams, but only a few realise their dreams, that
makes cowards of us all. - p.129

As he advanced in his profession as a psychiatrist and talked to
his patients, he realised that everyone has an unusual
story... Women who had studied in convent schools dreamed of
being sexually humiliated; men in suits and ties, high-ranking
civil servants, told him of the fortunes they spent on Rumanian
prostitutes just so that they could lick their feet. Boys in love
with boys, girls in love with their fellow schoolgirls. Husbands
who wanted to watch their wives having sex with strangers, women
who masturbated every time they found some hint that their men
had committed adultery. Mothers who had to suppress an impulse to
give themselves to the first delivery man who rang the doorbell,
fathers who recounted secret adventures with the bizarre
transvestites... - p.130

Live. If you live, God will live with you. If you refuse to run
his risks, He'll retreat to that distant Heaven and be merely a
subject for philosophical speculation. - p.138

A lot of people don't allow themselves to love, precisely because
of that, because there is a lot of things at risk, a lot of
future and a lot of past. In your case, there is only the
present. - p.148

Outside [the asylum] I will behave exactly like everyone
else. I'll go shopping at the supermarket, I'll exchange
trivialities with my friends, I'll waste precious time watching
television. But I know that my soul is free and that I can dream
and talk with other worlds which, before I came here, I didn't
even imagine existed. ... When someone irritates me, I'll tell
them what I think of them and I won't worry what they think of
me, because everyone will say" she's been just released from
Villete. - p.148

Some things are governed by common sense: putting buttons on the
front of a shirt is a matter of logic, since it would be very
difficult to button them up at the side, and impossible if they
were at the back. - p.151 [yet, consider bra's - for the first X
years, they were all buttoned at the back]

in Florence, there's a beautiful clock designed by Paolo Uccello
in 1443. Now the curious thing about this clock is that, although
it keeps time like all other clocks, its hands go in the opposite
direction to that of normal clocks. - p.152

- 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.   - Dr. Igor to Mari, p.153

[List of people who changed the world, p.165-166, Christ, Darwin,
Freud, Marx, Columbus, and list of
saints - Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Anthony, Francis of
Assisi, but no Buddha or Muhammad.]

[Ends on a weakish note, where Veronika and Eduard escape Vilete.]

.. . ."But yesterday, because I heard of a piano and a young woman who
is probably dead by now, I learnt something very important: life
inside is exactly the same as life outside. Both there and here people
gather together in groups, they build their walls and allow nothing
strange to trouble their mediocre existences. They do things because
they are used to doing them . . . . What I am saying is that the
Fraternity is exactly the same as the lives of almost everyone outside
Villete, carefully avoiding all knowledge of what lies beyond the
glass walls of the aquarium. For a long time, it was comforting and
useful, but people change, and now I am in search of adventure. . ."

When he had finished reading the note, the members of the Fraternity
all went to their rooms and wards, telling themselves that Mari had
finally gone mad . . .

---
Twenty-four-year-old Veronika seems to have everything -- youth and beauty,
boyfriends and a loving family, a fulfilling job. But something is missing in
her life. So, one cold November morning Veronika decides to die. She takes a
handful of sleeping pills expecting never to wake up. But she does -- at a
mental hospital where she is told that she has only days to live.
    This poignant international bestseller by the author of The Alchemist
takes readers on a quest to find meaning in a culture overshadowed by angst,
soulless routine, and pervasive conformity. Based on events in Coelho's own
life, Veronika Decides to Die questions the meaning of madness and celebrates
individuals who do not fit into patterns society considers to be normal. Bold
and illuminating, it is a dazzling portrait of a young woman at the
crossroads of despair and liberation, and a poetic, exuberant appreciation of
each day as a renewed opportunity.