"Veronika Decides to Die" by Paulo Coelho

Seems as if i am stuck on this author. For the moment, I am. There is promise in Coelho's writing and really, he is very good. and when i read a book that i like, i usually read another one by the same author.
Veronika Decides to Die is the third book i have read by Coelho and really, it is a good read. makes one think really. As usual, Furgie has not read this one as yet but she has finished reading Eleven Minutes. I will just ask her not to read this blog. By the way, she did like the same places of Eleven Minutes that i liked.
Okay, so the synopsis....Veronika is a 24 year old woman in Slovenia who takes a bunch of sleeping pills one morning because she has decided to die. The only thing is that she wakes up in a mental instutition called Villette. She finds out that she did not die right away (duh!) but she is told that one of her ventricles suffered necrosis and she will soon die...within a week. so with her days numbered (what a cliche) she begins to finally really live her life. she is not worried about being proper and following the rules of society because after all, she is instutionalized.
There are other side stories in the book. apart from Veronika, there are three other characters who help Veronika discover the meaning of life. there is zedka (suffering from depression), mari (who has anxiety attacks), and eduard (the schizophrenic). I like eduard most...although all of them are really strong characters.
I guess one of the main questions from the book is what will you do if your days are numbered? Well really they are.....it is the only certainty that we have once we accept the fact that we are born...but often times, we live as if we have an entire lifetime to do things when in reality, each day we live, we come closer to death. we become so illusioned and tangled in a web of "living" in society...and following norms that we make it our only reality. so how much of a difference does it make if someone told us that we were only going to live for one week for the most? what will we do differently?
well really, Veronika is not keen on living in the beginning but in the end, she grows to love life but she accepts that she will die at any minute and she resolves to being happy when she dies. she falls in love with eduard who is totally coherent.....we find that out. then there is dr. Igor. He has been experimenting on his patients all along and we find out in the end that the heart attack symptoms that Veronika has been having are brought about by injections that he has been giving her under the claim that they are her medicine. Really, Veronika's heart is strong. nothing has been damaged and we find that out in the end, right before the entire research of Dr.Igor is put in the light.
I've found out that this was another true story. my question was: I wonder if Veronika found out soon after that she was healthy and not going to die?
I liked this book more than Eleven Minutes. Maybe it is because of the psychiatry involved but it is worth the time i took to read it. really, it was not a long time (not big like Brother's Karamazov) and it is always a good thing to know that we can take time away from work/school/everyday life to travel into the other worlds that literature takes us to.


Several months later: June 24th, 2006...

Nan finally finished reading this book. she made an interesting point. Dr. Igor cured Veronika. he is a psychiatrist. in giving her a placebo, he made her want to live by letting her believe that she had but a few days. Maybe she never found out that her heart was strong but she would always live each day as if it were her last. In this way, Igor cured Veronika. maybe it was not intended but I am guessing that if a sequel is ever written, no one from Villette will go in search of Eduard and Veronika. that much i am sure of.