Book review: Veronica decides to die

I decided to read Veronica decides to die when I read its introductory note at the end of Paulo’s another book, The Valkyries. Turning one Page over the other, I will not say that I don’t know when it started and when it ended, because every single sentence left a mark on my heart.It carries you away swiftly from the reality around you to the world inside Villete.World of Veronics, Zedka, Eduard and Dr Igor.

Veronica decides to die because she thinks that she has spent her life to the full extent and carry on living will only increase her miseries. She decides to die because she’s not happy or unhappy either. It’s the same routine for her, same working days and nights. And she finds out that now nothing gonna change in her life. So she decides to die.

For that she chooses the most sophisticated method, sleeping pills. She could have thrown herself off one of the new buildings, but she thinks that her deformed body will hurt her parents, and they will have to go through identification process which will only increase their suffering. Shooting, jumping off a building, hanging, none of the above suited her feminine nature.

She decides to take a far more sophisticated method.

Taking the pills one by one and then waiting patiently for the unconsciousness to take over her, a question asked in a article catches her eyes, Where’s Solvenia? So she decides to write a letter to the newpaper, about Solvenia. Which was why she found herself in Villete, when she woke up after suicide attempt.

Villete, the famous and much-feared lunatic asylum. Veronica find out herself their when she opens her eyes, only to know that her heart is damaged and she has left with only a week to live. That doesn’t arise any more hope or will to live in her heart then she had when she attempted.

When she is moved to the ward with 20 more ppl to share, she tries to get more sleeping pills to end her life as soon as possible because she finds it terrible to wait for death to come a whole week. The news has been spread all through the Villete that she’s the pretty, young, healthy girl who is going to die in a week.

In her search for someone who can give her sleeping pills, she meets Zedka, who tells her the meaning on madness. She tells her that mad ppl also belong to the same planet, once they were also a pat of this very society, but their crime is that they r different, they live in their own world.

Veronica soon finds out that her life was monotonous because that’s the way she wanted it to be. She never wanted to try out new things. There she finds out what she lacked , what really made her suicide and that she shouldn’t have attempted suicide at all because she is knowing what life means and how to live.

There she suffers for love, she hates herself and everyone who made her life the way it was, she comes to know that she never did anything mad, she always tried to make other people happy, to be a good girl.Soon she finds out to be in love with Eduard, a schizophrenic.

If I am going to tell the rest, what are you going to read? I leave the rest to you people to find out.

As/this book, soon after you start it, you’ll realize that single page you turn, you confront the strongest of all of our feeling, one by one, which we always try hard to keep locked down inside, suppressed, only to recognize it’s bitterness when it’s too late to make any amendments, hatred, love, madness, fear.

Paulo makes you realize that it’s not life that stops offering changes; it’s what we do to ourselves. Closing our eyes from doing anything that’s different, that can change our life, guarding ourselves inside the high defensive walls of our mechanism. And you feel lingering shadows of death, strongly and deeply.

It gives you a great sense of peace, when you realize that you are not the only one blackmailed in the name of love, you are not the only one who feels. Other people also go through the same feelings, only very few people will talk about it. The intense pressure of society, parents are in a constant war with your desire to be yourself.

Paulo successfully leaves another mark on the hearts of all the people who ever decided what Veronica has, who ever felt like her, or many other characters in Villete.

One Paulo’s quote, from this book and I end my review here.

“Stay mad, but behave like normal people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do that without attracting attention.”