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READ IT. Really enjoyed the book. Lots of great quotes and ideas on what insanity truly is, and the ending totally caught me off guard.
For anyone who has struggled with feeling different, alone, or even fearful for their mental well-being, this book will resonate. He asks a lot of questions about the nature of sanity and insanity, and who, or what, defines what that means. Paulo Coelho's style of writing is so simple, and yet so moving. In this novel he tells of the story of a young woman who tries to commit suicide and recovers in an asylum.
But I still hesitated because the author is known for writing "inspirational" fiction. The rest of the book felt pretty "flat" to me. And then I found out that they were making a movie with Sarah Michelle Gellar as the main character, so I had to read it. The chapter about Mari and panic attacks was unbearable. I've been hearing some great things about Paulo Coelho, but none of his books interested me enough to check them out.
If you want to read some good fiction dealing with suicide and depression, I recommend "Suicide Notes" by Michael Thomas Ford and "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath. I think this book fails completely as a novel. The writing is average at best, the characters are one-dimensional, and the story is barely there and quite predictable. The book started off well enough but then the author introduces himself into the story for about two pages.
By the end of the book I was wondering: "Why." There was no need for the author to be in the book, and it only served to be an annoying distraction. Then I saw this book in the bookstore and thought it might be a good read. The ending was pretty much what sealed the deal for me that this wasn't a very good novel. It felt like I was a reading a textbook example of the disorder. The chapter about Zedka and depression was OK. I liked the part about astral projection though it went nowhere in terms of the story.
It felt inauthentic and I had a suspicion that that's the direction the author was going in, I just hoped he wouldn't be so predictable. It just felt like words on a page most of the time.
Overall, it felt like I was reading someone's thoughts about madness rather than a story about a particular character. I'll still watch the movie (probably on DVD), just to see how they handled adapting this novel.
If the novel ended on page 204 (in my edition, this means the last two chapters would be cut) I would have given it three stars. I love stories about disillusionment with life.
The most enjoyable part of the whole book was the chapter about Eduard the "schizophrenic" (highly unlikely from what I've read), and I think that's because the author had a similar experience with his parents when he was growing up. Besides chapters about Veronika and the other characters, there were three long chapters that focused on three different characters and their problems.
And now I see that my initial hesitations were correct. The writing didn't come off the page the way good writing does.
It help me to appreciated life and all the simple things that can make us happy and most important enjoy every single minute in life I really like the book I could not put it down.
It leaves the reader with much food for thought as Coelho is famous for. Great book. amazing. The ideas of pleasure, custom, love and life. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The concept of insanity and 'normality' has always been one to intrigue me over the years & I've never read a book that peeled back the layers and exposed the argument with such intellectual finesse and raw idealism and simply and poetically written, such as this.
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