i don't rate books based on character development and plot holes. if it made me bawl my eyes out and search up its fanarts at 3 am it's a 5/5

David Thewlis

Veronika Decides to Die - 2009

Part 1/?

Happy Birthday Sarah 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

April 14,1977

Buon Compleanno 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

14 Aprile 1977

rant about how much i didn't like Veronika Decides to Die by Paul Coelho because my mutual (@bloodyentrails) said i could do this. (all opinions mine)

Veronika Decides to Die tells the story of Veronika, who goes down a depression spiral.

She feels like life has no point, that she herself has no purpose, and she just wants to exit. She's from Slovenia, and like the citizens of a lot of countries that are neither famous nor infamous, even though she lives comfortably and well enough, she carries this annoyance that nobody knows where Slovenia is. She takes a bunch of pills, but is rescued from her suicide attempt. However, the doctor at the mental hospital she wakes up in tells her that she has irreparably damaged her heart. She only has a week to live.

During the course of this week at the mental hospital, she meets a young man around her age who is diagnosed with schizophrenia, and gets some advice about how to live and what's important in life from a woman who was a lawyer until debilitating panic attacks caused her to lose her career and get abandoned by her husband.

Coelho kept saying, over and over, that she's very pretty, that she thinks about her own prettiness, she can get a boyfriend whenever she wants, that her life actually consisted of doing a job she was bored by (as a librarian) and then going to a bar to pick up a casual sex partner when she doesn't have a boyfriend, and starting again the next day.

By the end of day 2 of 5 to live, Veronika has decided she will do whatever she feels like. One of those things is playing the piano at the mental hospital, which apparently she does well enough for it to function as a siren call for the schiozophrenic guy. By the evening of day four, she takes all her clothes off in front of this guy in the piano room at the mental hospital and masturbates to orgasm in front of him.

MAJOR SQUICKAGE. First of all, the guy is mute. He hasn't said a single word to her so far. Secondly, given that Veronika is described as a heterosexual normie, I find the idea that she would want to flash a stranger and jack off in front of him a really bizarre turn of events. Third, I felt really grossed out by Coelho having consistently described this woman, pointedly, over and over as being really pretty. He must've been building to this point, like, he wrote this whole book to build to this scene of this young thin pretty woman get naked and put on a sex show because she wants to and it's good for her. What in the actual fuck. You WISH women wanted to do this, dumbass.

OH and this then causes the mute mental hospital male patient and this woman to 'fall in love' and they 'run away' together. So, we have Liberation of a repressed woman = she does porny things instead of what an actually liberated repressed woman would do, for one, and for another we have, "love" cures mental illness. For good. Entirely.

Day 5 happens, and Veronika doesn't die.

Then the reader is told that she has been lied to this entire time. By her doctor. Because he thinks this is a course of treatment, to tell his suicidally depressed patient, a woman who actually went all the way through with a suicide attempt which took the deliberate action of swallowing pill after pill until she lost consciousness, that she had a heart failure situation going on and there was nothing to be done. Then he injected her with medication whose side effect was to give her heart-failure-type symptoms. Without information or consent.

The book ends with this Dr. Mengele type motherfucker congratulating himself for his 'effective course of treatment' in making Veronika OK and wanting to live and set up life with her mentally ill boyfriend with whom she has essentially absconded from hospital.

I CANNOT BEGIN TO EXPRESS MY RAGE about the horror of this. The smug self congratulation by the author (speaking through the doctor) that he has done the right thing, that most mental illness can be 'cured' in this way, that this is a warm and moving parable he has told?

VOMIT. VOMIT OF BLOOD. I HATE HIM SO MUCH.

— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

Do you ever just look at a book and wonders how is it going to destroy me?

But then it did.

I'm looking for book recs! I used to read a lot in elementary school but kinda fell out of the habit, but now that I'm almost 18 I wanna get back into reading but I have no clue where to start. In the last year the only books I've really enjoyed were the metamorphosis and veronika decides to die and I'd be forever in love if yall could make some recs <3

Death was sweet; it smelled of wine and stroked her hair.

Paulo Coelho, from Veronika Decides to Die, 1998

“When I took the pills, I wanted to kill someone I hated. I didn't know that other Veronikas existed inside me, Veronikas that I could love.”

Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

Nothing in this world happens by chance. 💙

_ Veronika decides to die. 📖

Hello there, fellow bibliophile. Today's review is on an interesting creature by Paulo Coelho :

<The Thoughts! > It was only after reading the soul-hungry, intense words of Paulo Coelho that made me go into consistent states of self-contemplation in his book Veronika Decides to Die that I felt more conflict with myself and my life than I ever had before. I felt the need to simply slacken and not do a thing, not commit to my academics asi had intensively done in during my IGCSEs. At first, I ruled it off as a laziness induced by the ideas brought through a man's writing and portrayal of his life through colourful diction used to describe a mad woman trying to find the easy way of life. But then it dawned to me how flawed my thinking was on this beautiful literary work. My studies did not excite me or rouse me the way they did before because just like Veronika had realised during her time in Villete, I was going to end up dissatisfied with my current decisions in the near and inevitable future. To hate myself, the way Veronika did (before she realised she had some self loathing) because I succefully strained my brain with science scribbles for 6+ years only to tend to prejudicial patients for the rest of my life, instead of spending my current youth and my days scribbling senseless couplets and bad book ideas (thankfully I have resorted to writing distorted thoughts on interesting books), reading books and falling in love again and again with the same boy whilst being misunderstood because I'm just to young to fall in love and singing, only to cause envy and invoke praise out of emotional listeners. The lif I romanticize my life every morning drive to school before feeling demotivated because, well, it's a morning drive to school. At only 17 years, I understand 24 year old Veronika's significance as she mirrored Paulo Coelho and I share her idiosyncrasies and think she chose the perfect yet agonizing road to self discovery: Deciding to die.

On to the review:

This book is a well worded insightful work that gets you thinking on the various processes of life and thinking as well as the significance and importance of mental health and how seriously it can be taken and or recieved. Mental health has been portrayed in this book by Coelho (corresponding with his own experiences) not simply as an illness but as a state of mind, One that can never be fully understood. Throughout this delightful literary work he uses a plethora of words and colourful writing on a sensitive topic to entice one's intellect and keep the pages turning! Go ahead and give it a try, it definitely will not disappoint!

"Veronika decides to die" (2009) dir. Emily Young

David Thewlis

Veronika Decides to Die - 2009

Part 2/?

“O grande alvo da Amargura (ou Vitríolo, como preferia o Dr. Igor) era a vontade. As pessoas atacadas desse mal iam perdendo o desejo de tudo, e em poucos anos já não conseguiam sair de seu mundo  – pois tinham gasto enormes reservas de energia construindo altas muralhas para que a realidade fosse aquilo que desejavam que fosse.

Ao evitar o ataque externo, haviam também limitado o crescimento interno. Continuavam indo ao trabalho, vendo televisão, reclamando do trânsito e tendo filhos, mas tudo isso acontecia automaticamente, e sem qualquer grande emoção interior  – porque, afinal, tudo estava sob controle.

O grande problema do envenenamento por Amargura era que as paixões  – ódio, amor, desespero, entusiasmo, curiosidade  – também não se manifestavam mais. Depois de algum tempo, já não restava ao amargo qualquer desejo. Não tinham vontade de viver, nem de morrer, este era o problema.

[...] A única vantagem da doença, do ponto de vista social, é que já se transformara numa regra; portanto, a internação não se fazia mais necessária – exceto nos casos onde a intoxicação era tão forte que o comportamento do doente começava a afetar aos outros. Mas a maioria dos amargos podia continuar lá fora, sem constituir ameaça à sociedade ou aos outros, já que  – por causa das altas muralhas construídas ao redor de si mesmos – estavam totalmente isolados do mundo, embora parecessem partilhar dele.”

– Veronica decide morrer, Paulo Coelho.

I don't have depression, and my aggression tends to be outward directed and not inner directed, but I just feel like this passage from Veronika Decides To Die indicates Paul Coelho shouldn't have tried to write the inner life of a woman with suicidal depression:

"That's why I was crying,' said Veronika. 'When I took the pills, I wanted to kill someone I hated. I didn't know that other Veronikas existed inside of me, Veronikas that I could love."

This seems so trite??

'Stop thinking all the time that you're in the way, that you're bothering the person next to you. If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have the courage to complain, that's their problem.'

— From Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho