Veronika Decides to Die

Unknown, Paulo Coelho, Margaret Jull Costa

Category: Literature

Tags: Literature

The bestselling Brazilian author of The Alchemist delicately etches this morose but ultimately uplifting story of the suicidal Veronika, who creeps along the boundary between life and death, sanity and madness, happiness and despair. Veronika, 24, works in a library in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and rents a room in a convent; she is an attractive woman with friends and family, but feelings of powerlessness and apathy tempt her to find freedom in an overdose of sleeping pills. When Veronika awakens in the purgatory of Villete, the countrys famous lunatic asylum, she is told her suicide attempt weakened her heart and she has only days to live. At this point, Coelho takes a role in the novel; he describes the circumstances under which he discovered Veronikas story and then recounts his own youthful incarceration in a Brazilian sanatorium, consigned there by parents who couldnt understand his unusual behavior. As quickly as he drops in, however, he drops out again, relying on interior monologues