Front cover

I grabbed Veronika Decides to Die (by Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho) from my dusty bookshelf to begin with, out of my many online reading challenges I'm participating in 2011. I've always loved reading ever since I was a kid; but I got off the way a couple of years ago.

I bought the book so many years ago and I borrowed it to a number of people, and they've returned it to me, having read the book, and I myself haven't read it after all these years. Since I'm also doing my reading challenge, I'll be posting some reviews about the subjects explored within these books I read. Sort of like book reviews; just from a personal standpoint, and perhaps for inspiration plotting fiction as a writer. Especially with my character, my role-play, Saluna the Student.

I've just flipped through the first few pages, finishing the first chapter. She was just going through a period of self-exploration, spending some time in full consciousness, thinking about life in general, after taking doses of sleeping pills and waiting for her body to die slowly. Choosing this method shows her feminine method of dying - rather than jumping off the roof and such. Questioning God's existence, she probes readers hard, philosophical questions. Much like my character, Saluna. It was mentioned that Veronika watches the TV, reads the newspapers, and knows thoroughly what's going on in the world, and her powerlessness to help reaffirms her decision to commit suicide, despite knowing it is a "taboo", to hell with traditions. In which case, by the end of the chapter, her body rejects her, and then she completely lost her consciousness.

Sarah Michelle Gellar as Veronika

She decided to make her last act before death as writing a letter to the magazine she was reading while waiting for the minutes to go by before her death, because the journalist started the article she was reading with a very stupid question: "Where is Slovenia?" Homme, the magazine she's referring to, is published throughout Europe, so it's a stupid idea to start the first line of an article.

As to how it relates to me, I tend to have some degrees of feeling inclined to write long, boring letters explaining where Indonesia is in the map of the world to Americans when they asked me where it is. One time, the reply I get from saying "right on the Equator", was: "Where is the Equator?"

If I were to put myself into Veronika's position, deciding to die, after tiresome ponderings on life-and-death situations, I would've had the same patterns of thoughts in my head: What would it matter if the headlines on the newspaper frontpage is this absurd? A middle-aged woman writing a letter to a magazine as a suicide note, without specifying the reasons for her suicide. After all, with the other bombarding news stories we are receiving day by day, would it really matter?



Even if the world is going crazy, that is, the externals ceases to cooperate, Veronika shouldn't have taken the sleeping pills. Otherwise, there won't be future stories coming from her psyche. It would pretty much be equivalent to Saluna taking the bluepill as her final decision, which is dreaming forever and never finding out the truth.

つづく。。。The last time I wrote about Saluna through MyWOTD, I reported to you her tragic death swallowing the redpill. To be continued...