I
would describe my first foray into Veronika. Odd and slightly disturbing.
So:
Spoilers Ahoy and also a Trigger Warning for descriptions of attempted suicide,
a potentially upsetting rape-like scene, and descriptions of mistreatment in a
mental hospital.
Veronika
Decides to Die (Veronika decide morrer in the original Porteguese) is set in
Ljubljana, Slovenia, tells the story of Veronika (I suppose you could have
parsed that one out), a 24-year-old young woman, who has decided that she has
reached the height of her life. She had determined that from this point that
life and beauty will probably get no better, and out of no real sadness or
unhappiness she has made, in her opinion, the perfectly rational decision to
end her life. Her incomplete attempt on her own life winds her up in a mental
institution called Villette, in Slovenia, where she awakens to the news that
her attempt has irreparably damaged her heart; she is told she has only days to
live.
The
story is supposedly based on Coelho’s own experiences in mental institutions in
his youth where his parents send him for refusing to acquiesce to their demands
that he become an Engineer instead of a writer, or at least something useful
and respectable. Coelho’s refusal to become something productive proved, to
them, that he was “mad”. One of the central themes in Veronika is the idea that
collective madness is really sanity, and that sanity is really in the hands of
the beholder.
Essentially,
if everyone in a room, or even a
kingdom, believes one reality to be the truth, except for a single person,
irrespective of that one person’s authority (the doctor, a king, etc.), then
the sanity of that authority is irrelevant, because it is the collective
reality of the masses that matters and thus becomes the rational way of
thinking.
The
way you view this theme really depends on your views of people’s right to
define their own mental abilities. I viewed this book through two very
different lenses in my life, one where I was fighting my own mind, and one
where I was coming to terms with myself instead; a period of self-acceptance
rather than self-loathing (still working on that last part). Veronika depicts a
mental institution that both suppresses people’s free will, yet allows them to
stay beyond the requirement that binds them if they choose to do so. Don’t be
fooled, however: There are still many things going on, such as forced
medication, forced inside and outside time, and even a scene that describes,
very graphically, a treatment of induced insulin shock that sends a patient
into what she calls a state of astral travel. The balance of treatment of human
dignity with that of the way that disabled people are often treated as objects
to be shuffled around and poked and strapped down is troublesome at best, and
hard to read without a watery field in front of you at… well my worst. Maybe
not yours.
Very
troubling to me is the overarching theme, embodied in Dr. Igor, the head
psychiatrist at Villette, who has decided that Veronika, a beautiful and
vibrant young girl, is wasting her life, and must be taught a Very Special
Lesson. So sad, is it, that she has decided to throw away youth, and beauty,
and that she is ignoring all that life must be waiting to hand her. He,
obviously, knows her life better than she, and is uniquely prepared to teach
her that she is, indeed, Doing It Wrong. R-O-N-G, even. How good of Dr. Igor,
this man, to come and rescue this poor, helpless, and foolish girl from what
might have been the worst mistake ever.
Dr.
Igor has this theory, see, that people, like a defibrillator paddle on a heart,
just need a jump start to avoid the heart attack that is this mental illness,
something he calls “vitriol”. He believes he can shock people into appreciating
life and just help them realize that they can simply buck up and learn to love
life again.
I
don’t want to spoil the book for you, gentle readers, if at this point you are
still with me, so I won’t go into detail about how Veronika becomes not only
the tool by which he provokes many of the residents of Villette, including
Eduard, a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia who becomes a love interest for
Veronica, and Mari who has frequent panic attacks. I also won’t tell you how
Veronika learns her own Very Special Lesson, because she is not left out of
that condescending rule of Dr. Igor who swings his diploma like a true
Patriarch. She suddenly sees that she is free from the rules of a society that
has given her a laundry list of expectations, and that she now may act like the
“crazy” person that she is being treated like. No one believes that she just
felt like ending her life, for no particular reason, so she may as well act the
part. She starts to see the comfort that is Villette’s lack of accountability.
I
think this book speaks strongly to the way that we dehumanize and mistrust
mental health patients and people living with any variety of mental illness.
Even if I don’t always appreciate Coelho’s delivery.
A
caution to you, gentle readers: There is a rape-like scene, depending on how
you read it (the first time I read the book, I did not read it this way, the
second, I certainly did). Veronika performs a masturbatory act in front of a
person who neither consents nor denies consent. It is fairly graphic in
description, and it very much made me uncomfortable, no matter how “freeing” it
made Veronika feel.
The
book was made into a movie that I have not yet seen, as it didn’t appear at any
theatre anywhere near where I was living. It stars Sarah Michelle Gellar as
Veronika (a stellar choice, IMO), and David Thewlis, most well-known to me as
Professor Lupin from the Harry Potter series, as Dr. Igor.
Here is the trailer.
Who
out there, gentle readers, fellow contributors, has read Veronika? Thoughts?
Popcorn? Tomatoes?
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