When
I looked at the book title “Veronika decides to die” at the very beginning, I really
wondered what the book was about. A teenager girl that wanted to commit suicide
because of the disapproval given by her parents in maintaining a relationship
with a boy who is from different class of society that the parents frowned
upon? My curiosity got the better of me and I started reading the book soon I got
free time. Later on, only I found out that I was wrong and the story was not so
shallow and easily predictable. In fact, the background and the ways the writer
presented the story were quite unique to me. The story starts with a scene in
which a lady from Ljubljana, whose name is Veronika, is trying to kill herself.
She has a very special way of seeing life and feels that everything in her life
is the same; mundane things are repeated days after days where one day is
exactly like the other. And, once her youth has gone, her life would go all the
way downhill and increase likelihood of suffering. She does not see the
objective of living in this world even she knows that suicide is an affront to
all religion code and man should struggle to survive, not to succumb.
After
her failure of committing suicide, she is sent to a mental hospital called Vilette
and in this place he meet with the others who have very own reasons of being
admitted to the hospital. Some of them are schizophrenics, maniacs or lunatics
who could not really distinguish the real things or a hallucination. Some of
them are simply tired of living in outside world and want to get rid of
everything seems unnecessary in their lives. Going through a period of time in
which she always want to kill herself, Veronika grows to understand better what
she is looking for after her interaction with the doctor and the patients. Each
of the patient just like Veronika, has a long story about why they are here and
whether or not they want to leave the hospital to return to the normal lives
outside.
It
is a bit difficult to write about what I really learnt from this book but I
like reading the stories of each of the characters because what happened in
their lives are different from the people that I can meet day in and day out.
Perhaps I should spend some time to think about whether or not I live in my
very own world --- with minimum desire to let others neither step into my zone
nor become a part of my world. Also, I am curious to find out whether people in
modern society nowadays experience more despair, pessimism and a sense of
futility if they cannot do something in the ways they want the things to be.
Whether or not they would take immense pleasure in the suffering of others
simply because that make them believe they are happy and that life has been
generous with the certain group of people like them.
Society
always imposes on us a collective way of behaving, and most of us never stop to
wonder how our behaviors are influenced by people around us. Most of the people
just think all these are norms and follow blindly without asking simple
questions like why the keyboard is QWERTY but not ABCDE or why the hands of a
clock should go in one particular direction and not in the other…perhaps we
simply accept the fact that when a lot of people think something is right, and that thing must be right.
(608 words)
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