Veronika Decides to Die toys with the two main ideas of vitriol and insanity, two abstract things which, according to Dr. Igor of Villete, warp the human soul. One is the poison, the other the symptom. Stepping deeper into Villete, the mental hospital, we learn that both are derived from fear, the foundation of panic attacks, mental illnesses, and people like Veronika deciding to die.
Paulo Coelho creates a highly permeable, dreamlike space within Villete. Unknowable yet suggestive, and evocative of a French cottage by name, it is at once a prison and a place of freedom. The patients are contained, injected, and often sedated against their will, but in a strange way are freer than anyone working a 9-to-5 will ever be. Everyone at Villete has fear in common but ironically, the “normal” people outside of Villete have the most of it. The main lesson that Veronika and the other Villete patients must come to learn is that we all experience fear, just in different forms. Fear may not be visible to the naked eye, but it is visible in all its irrational forms. As irrational actions, for example.
(An idea I had while reading is that in life we often exchange one kind of fear for another, preferring the one easy for us personally to bear. For instance, I once put a microwavable beef patty in the microwave for two minutes according to the instructions. About a minute in, it started making loud popping noises. With thirty seconds left, the noise was now so loud and the bowl rattling, so I got scared and stopped the microwave. When I took it out the patty was still cold in the middle and truthfully, slightly pink, but I decided I’d rather the tiny risk of salmonella than the very large one (or so I thought) of an explosion in the kitchen. So I ate it without cooking it any further. You see? It was a choice irrational to the average person, but perfectly rational to me.)
Characters in Villete make such choices—seemingly irrational, but all with their own kind of defense mechanism or reasoning activating it. They all, however, end up understanding that fear underlies it all, and deciding to fight it because life is worth living. This was in fact so cliché a message that I thought surely there must have been something I missed—but I couldn’t bring myself to reread it.
The book in other words is dreamy, and sleepy, and never really seems to wake up. Characters, names, and ideas are kept vague like ones in a dream. Perhaps on purpose, to establish tone, but it has payoffs. It makes you drowsy; the story wanders and prods, but never punches; and as soon as you finish the last page, the characters slip off and float away, since they’re all so archetypal. There’s Veronika the beautiful unattached young woman, Eduard the crazed schizophrenic spiritual, Mari the wise old mentor, and Dr. Igor the doctor-turned-villain. They all seem puppetlike in a sense, saying vague grandiose lines about human nature within the infinite universe. In fact, what left a greater impact on me than the actual story was the essay at the end about Paulo Coelho’s own experience with institutionalization and electric shock therapy. That was real, and jarring. I wondered then if it was fair to expect a writer to paint a stark portrait of what must have been their most traumatic experience in life. Maybe the dreaminess is just as well.
