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Read Veronika Decides To Die (2006)

Veronika Decides to Die (2006)

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3.69 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
0061124265 (ISBN13: 9780061124266)
Language
English
Publisher
harper perennial

Veronika Decides To Die (2006) - Plot & Excerpts

كالعادة ، مش ريفيو على قد ما هي أفكار مشتتة راودتني ، هاحاول أجمعها هنا..*الرواية كنت هاقراها من فترة كبيرة جدًا ، وماحصلش، وأديني أهو قريتها دلوقتي، ف أكتر وقت مناسب تقريبًا على الإطلاق.كنت لسه قبلها بفكر، ووصلت للإقناع بفكرة إن الواحد مننا فعلًا عنده حياة واحدة مش ألف، يعني أنا مش هاتنازل ف وحدة عن أحلامي عشان رغبات ناس تانيين مهما كانوا مين أو مهما أدّعوا مصلحتي، السنة اللي بتعدّي مش هاترجع تاني، ف إحنا ف غِنى عن التنازلات اللي بنقدمها ، لأي حد أيًا كان، فليكُن الأهل مثلًا، مش متخيلة إن فعلًا بنعيش نص حياتنا على مزاجهم والنص التاني بنحاول نتأقلم مع الشخص الجديد اللي رسموهلنا ، البعيد كل البُعد عن شخصنا الحقيقي، وده برضه مش معناه إننا مانقدمش أي تنازلات ونتطرق للنرجسية، بس الفكرة كلها أعتقد تكمُن في الاستحقاق، إن البني آدم يبقى عارف هل الشيء/الشخص/إلخ.. ده يستحق أتنازل عشانه؟" - واطلقي العنان للأنا الحقيقية كي تُسفر عنها الحجاب.- وما هي الأنا الحقيقية؟- إنها ما أنت عليه فعلًا ، وليس ما يصنعه منك الآخرون "فيرونيكا فكرتني بـ " أنا أكتر واحد ميّت يقدر يقنعك تعيش " لا إراديًا فيرونيكا صحِّت الرغبة في الحياة جوّا ماري وغيرها " إدراك الموت يحثنا على عيش الحياة بشدة أكبر " ، " لدي الكثير لأفعله ، أمور لطالما أرجأتها إلى أجل لاحق عندما كنت أخال أن الحياة أبدية ، أمور فقدت اهتمامي بها، عندما رحت أعتقد أن الحياة غير جديرة بأن تُعاش " ، " كل يوم ستحياه سيكون بمثابة معجزة في نظرها، وهي الحال ف الواقع، عندما تفكر في عدد الأمور غير المتوقعة التي يمكن أن تحصل معك في كل ثانية من حياتك الهشة " .. النقطة دي تحديدًا أخدت حقها، ومش محتاجة إني أتكلم عنها، ولا أصدّق عليها." ليس لديك ما تخسرينه، لا يبيح العديد من الناس فتح قلوبهم للحب، وهذا السبب بالتحديد، يحملهم على المجازفة كثيرًا، وعلى التفكير بالمستقبل، وعلى استحضار الماضي البعيد، لكن في حالتك أنت لا وجود سوى للحاضر " ، النقطة دي غالبًا بيعاني منها ناس كتير.. أعتقد إني أكثرهم على الإطلاق -_- ، بهرب للماضي كتير، وبفكر ف المستقبل بخصوص أمرٍ ما أكتر من اللازم، وبنسى الحاضر، ده كان كفيل يسبب مشاكل تخص الموضوع ده... بس محدش بيتعلم ببلاش!عجبني جدًا الكلام عن المنطق والحاجات المُعترف بها ع العموم زي التقاليد وما إليه، وإنها مش ضروري تكون الأصح والأنسب والأكثر منطقية ، بس هي ف نظر الناس " صح " لإنه تم الإتفاق عليها! -_-" مبدئيًا كل ما يحدث لنا في الحياة هو خطأنا، وخطأنا وحدما ، يمر العديد من الناس بمواقف صعبة مماثلة لما نمر به ويتصرفون إزاءها بطريقة مغايرة تمامًا لما نقوم به نحن، فقد بحثنا عن أسهل منفذ لنا، بحثنا عن واقع منفصل " ، كلام ماري لإدوارد... ، " وماذا لو أنه ناضل أكثر بقليل ؟ " الجملة دي قعدت ترن في ودني كتير، وفكرتني بمواقف قعدت أفكر هو أنا ناضلت كفاية؟ ولا ماناضلتش ؟ ولا ناضلت أكثر من اللزوم والموضوع أصلًا مايستحقش ؟ لحد ما عقلي شَت وماوصلتش لإجابة ف بطّلت تفكير كالعادة.فيرونيكا متمثلة ف 3/4 المصريين متهيألي إن مكنش البني آدمين كلهم يعني، الفرق الوحيد إنهم أقل شجاعة من إنهم ينهوا حياتهم بالإنتحار أو تمسكًا بقيم دينية أو أيًا كان يعني، وعلى الجانب الآخر أقل حكمة من إنهم يبدأوا يغيروا حياتهم.بدون تعليق.."لهذا كنت أبكي ، أردت تناول الحبوب لقتل شخصي الذي أكرهه لم أعلم أن بداخلي عدة شخصيات غيري ، عدة فيرونيكات...لكنت أحببتهن." كان للموسيقى قدرة النفاذ إلى عالمه البعيد، بعدًا يتعدى القمر نفسه، وكانت قادرة على صنع المعجزات أيضًا "وأخيرًا الجملة الأكثر عبقرية على الإطلاق " يمكن اختصار كتاباتهم - الإنجيل - التوراة - القرآن - كتابات الملحدين - في فعل واحد ، هو : إحيوا ! فإن حييتم فإن الله سيحيا معكم.وآه يا سيدي، كلنا مجانين بطريقة أو بأخرى، ودمتم.

"The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night.Nietzsche" “I need a sign, that things are gonna change. I need a reason to go on. I need some hope. And in the absence of hope, I need to stay in bed and feel like I might die today.Meredith Grey, Grey’s Anatomy" "An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely.""But humans are all alike, she thought. We have replaced nearly all of our emotions with fear."This book allows the reader to reevaluate the importance of life and that each day is precious … not to be wasted.Coelho discusses Conformity, society norms and its danger, Madness/insanity and what they really mean within the chains of society norms, Death and life and how knowing that death is imminent changes your perception of life.===================================“Insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there. We've all felt that. And all of us, one way or another, are insane.” -----------------------“Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?” -----------------------"She went to work every day, always keeping to the same timetable, always making sure she wasn’t perceived as a threat by her superiors; she was content; she didn’t struggle, and so she didn’t grow"----------------------- “Two of the hardest decisions in life: the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage to accept whatever you encounter.” -----------------------“An intense life needs a touch of madness.”-----------------------" A lot of people go through the same difficulties we went through, and they react completely differently. We looked for the easiest way out: a separate reality."-----------------------“I once saw a woman wearing a low-cut dress; she had a glazed look in her eyes, and she was walking the streets of Ljubljana when it was five degrees below zero. I thought she must be drunk, and I went to help her, but she refused my offer to lend her my jacket. Perhaps in her world it was summer and her body was warmed by the desire of the person waiting for her. Even if that person only existed in her delirium, she had the right to live and die as she wanted, don’t you think?”Veronika didn’t know what to say, but the madwoman’s words made sense to her. Who knows; perhaps she was the woman who had been seen half-naked walking the streets of Ljubljana?“I’m going to tell you a story,” said Zedka. “A powerful wizard, who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which all the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go mad.“The following morning, the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone, which the magician had not managed to poison. The king was worried and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health. The policemen and the inspectors, however, had also drunk the poisoned water, and they thought the king’s decisions were absurd and resolved to take no notice of them.“When the inhabitants of the kingdom heard these decrees, they became convinced that the king had gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. They marched on the castle and called for his abdication.“In despair the king prepared to step down from the throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: ‘Let us go and drink from the communal well. Then we will be the same as them.’“And that was what they did: The king and the queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the king was displaying such wisdom, why not allow him to continue ruling the country?“The country continued to live in peace, although its inhabitants behaved very differently from those of its neighbors. And the king was able to govern until the end of his days.”Veronika laughed.“You don’t seem crazy at all,” she said.“But I am, although I’m undergoing treatment since my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. While I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being crazy, living my life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?”“People who have all drunk from the same well.”“Exactly,” said Zedka. “They think they’re normal, because they all do the same thing. Well, I’m going to pretend that I have drunk from the same well as them.”

What do You think about Veronika Decides To Die (2006)?

Pretty, single, 24-year-old Veronika decides to die for two reasons, both of them phony: one, because she realizes she will one day be old; and two, because a lot of things are wrong in this world. She then takes a lot of sleeping pills. While waiting to die, as if she's waiting for her cat to finish drinking its milk, Veronika decides to read a magazine and then write to the editor of that magazine. Which made the scene cartoonish.This rare combination of phoniness and cartoonishness gelled and gave birth to this masterpiece. A masterpiece of nothingness, like a gigantic void proud of its vast emptiness. Paolo Coelho is like a god, not only to those who worship him, for he has created something out of nothing using the time-tested way of hoodwinking morons who read books like this: sprinkling lots of amphibologies and gobbledygooks to a plotless tale of nonsense. Gripping their highlighters, these morons would then make passages like this shine in neon, marvel at how deep they are, and then give the book a 5-star rating at goodreads.com--"We all live in our own world. But if you look up at the starry sky, you'll see that all the different worlds up there combine to form constellations, solar systems, galaxies." (p.162).He could have added: If you feel all alone in this big, wide world as if you carry the weight of all the sadness there is, then look up at the starry, starry sky during a starry, starry night and realize that there are aliens living in all those other planets who, in their solitude, likewise pine for the worlds they cannot see.Damn, I sure do sound better than Coelho!
—Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly

At about 50 pages in, it's a little frightening how much I've identified with Veronika thus far, how much I understand her rationale for wanting to die. She can only see one path unfolding for herself, and it's one she can't stomach. I get that. But unlike Veronika I haven't given up hope that my path may yet fork off in unexpected and exciting directions.I also read and think there must be a certain kind of comfort in going truly insane. Not this garden-variety neurosis I experience, but really, disconnected-from-reality insane. We're so frightened of the idea of insanity, of not knowing what's going on around us or not being able to distinguish truth from fantasy, but what would it be like to live it? There's a part of me that thinks maybe it would be just a little liberating, and I can understand why the Fraternity (?) wants to stay in the asylum instead of returning to the world outside.---I'm settled in to read. It's drizzling rain and the sky outside is a deep, melancholy gray. I've got pillows stacked up on the couch, the cat languorously swishing his tail as he gazes out the window, and a cup of chocolate truffle coffee on the little rolling cart we use for a coffee table. Angelo Badalementi's haunting soundtrack music from Twin Peaks pours from the tinny speakers on my laptop. It's kind of a perfect day.I just came across this passage.Depression.The doctors said that a recently discovered substance, serotonin, was one of the compounds responsible for how human beings felt. A lack of serotonin impaired one's capacity to concentrate at work, to sleep, to eat, and to enjoy life's pleasures. When this substance was completely absent, the person experienced despair, pessimism, a sense of futility, terrible tiredness, anxiety, difficulties in making decisions, and would end up sinking into a permanent gloom, which would lead either to complete apathy or suicide. ...In Zedka's case, however, the reasons were simpler than anyone suspected: there was a man hidden in her past, or rather, the fantasy she had built up about a man she had known a long time ago.Oh, Zedka, I suspect many of us can trace the roots of depression to the fantasy of a man (or woman) hidden in our pasts.I'm now eager to read on and discover Zedka's story.The impossible love. The refusal to believe the impossible love is impossible. Hope itself can be a sort of madness sometimes, when it's false, when we allow it to consume us rather than uplift. Yes. I know this.Now back to Veronika, and, holy shit, I could just as well be reading my own journal.She had overcome her minor defects only to be defeated by matters of fundamental importance. She had managed to appear utterly independent when she was, in fact, desperately in need of company. ... She gave all her friends the impression that she was a woman to be envied, and she expended most of her energy in trying to behave in accordance with the image she had created of herself.Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn't care about anything. ...She might have impressed a lot of people with her strength and determination, but where had it left her? In the void. Utterly alone.I suspect Veronika soon will learn she's not quite as alone as she thinks. God, I hope so.Also? I think I have to stop reproducing passages from this book or I'll end up quoting the whole damn thing.Dr. Igor? The psychiatrist? Quite possibly the craziest character in the book. He's laughably absurd. I loved the interchange between him and Veronika's mother -- the jumping back and forth between points-of-view and the mother's puzzlement at the things Igor was saying.Oh. Here's another snippet. "Haven't you learned anything, not even with the approach of death? 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."The supposedly insane people in this novel are all ones who are challenging and rejecting these unspoken rules we all live by, that hold us down and hold us back. These ideas that we should follow certain expected paths and behave in certain ways and suppress our true selves. These lunatics are calling bullshit on society, and it's wonderful.---And now I'm done, and I feel like I've gone on a journey with this book and come out the other side much like Veronika, Mari, Eduard and Zedka -- ready to embrace my life and my capacity for love.
—Misha

Aj the Ravenous Reader said: "Saw the movie and liked it. This one is quite different from other Cuelho's books.^^ "Yes,it's definitely different from his other books!I'm going to watch the movie tomorrow,I really like the cast so I hope that I'll like the movie,too. =)
—Norah Sumner

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