Veronika Decides To Die

Warning: Mild spoilers

This novel was written by Portuguese author, Paulo Coelho, and it was published in 1998 and has a 3.7/5 on Goodreads.

It has 210 pages and it makes you question yourself, the universe, society and the everything in between for every single page of it.

The plot is about Veronika who decides in the first few pages of the book that this world is not for her. She doesn't decide this lightly nor impulsively and not because she was unhappy. Veronika decides to die because she cannot think of a single reason to be alive.

Unfortunately for her, she does not die and her loving mother puts her in a mental hospital called Villete where they tell her that she has little more than a few days left to live due to irreparable damage which she did to her heart with the suicide attempt.

During her stay at Villete, Veronika meets many interesting and complicated people. Oddly enough, none of them are mad. Zedka is one of the first acquaintances that she meets, and we get a beautiful insight into her mind and how she feels about the world.

The second is Mari who is part of the Fraternity, a group of rich and completely sane inmates to Villete, and we get some back story to Mari as well and why she has decided to remain in the hospital instead of facing the real world.

One of the most interesting people that Veronika meets, to me anyway, is Eduard. Eduard is a schizophrenic that doesn't speak but makes it very clear that he wishes her to play the piano for him. We learn that Eduard is actually not as mad as we may have thought when he reveals that he can actually speak, he just didn't have anything important to say since his parents disregarded his dreams to be an artist of Paradise.

This book was truly amazing and it had a great plot twist at the end which I honestly didn't see coming. It really shows you how important life is and that it doesn't really matter what you're doing, you just need to live every day in every way that you can.

Thanks for reading xx