Sep 24, 2009 03:41 AM
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(Updated Sep 24, 2009 03:47 AM)
The story begins on 11th November 1997, in Slovenia, the day Veronika decides that now the day has arrived for her to kill herself. She takes an overdose of sleeping pills to put herself out of her desolation. This decision was based on her belief that she had spent her life to the full extent and to carry on living will only increase her miseries.
She decides to die because she was neither happy nor unhappy. It was the same routine for her, same working days and nights. She realizes that now nothing was going to change for her and life somehow had lost its meaning. As she awaits her death she watches the routine life from her window and feels at peace with her decision. While flipping through the pages of a magazine, a question asked in an article catches her eyes, where’s Slovenia? So she decides to write a letter to the newspaper, about Slovenia explaining its existence and making its anonymity, the reason of her death.
Her failed attempt leads her to a mental asylum called Vilette. As she regains consciousness, she realizes that her suicide had not been successful and after recovering she would have to go back to her routine life and live it on the terms of others, spend it for pleasing all and meeting their expectations. But later she is told that although she is alive, her heart is now irreparably damaged and she has only a few days to live. Waiting for her death to come, she realizes that time has lost all meaning. All she had to do was wait for the day, the minute and the second when she will finally close her eyes on this world.
During her first conscious night in the asylum, she meets Zedka, another inmate who had left everything in her life to search for her impossible love. Her futile search led to depression and finally she landed in the asylum. She experiences astral journeys during the course of her treatment and explores the world around herself in a way that was strange by all standards.
She becomes a friend to Veronika and on the day of her release, she leaves her with the thoughts of limitless and reasonless love. Zedka decides to leave her depression in the asylum but carries with her all other sorts of madness which now will be normal for her and others, as she was considered to be abnormal.Veronika also meets Mari, a member of the Fraternity (a group of longer standing members, who could have left several years ago, but stay at the states expenses due to the hospitals familiarity, and who behave like dangerous maniacs whenever there is a government inspection).
Mari, a successful lawyer, enters the asylum as a panic attack patient. Though her state is completely curable, she decides to stay back and conform to the rules and life of the asylum rather than facing the world outside which had shunned her due to her illness. She teaches Veronika to experience ultimate pleasure and push herself beyond her boundaries. To be your own self is the best way to live and this can only happen when we remain true and not let others adulterate us. In the end, inspired by Veronika’s courage to live each day as it comes, Mari decides to leave the asylum and follow her heart and free her soul.Veronika’s life changes when she meets Eduard, a schizophrenic, whose madness was reportedly beyond cure. Being the son of a diplomat, he had seen all comforts in life but his road accident changes his life .He gets inspired by the lives of great visionaries and creates his own visions of paradise.
He gets conflicted between his parents’ wishes of him becoming a diplomat and his own of becoming a painter. Split between the two, he finally looses the thread of attachment and ends up in the asylum. Here, he gets enchanted by the music that Veronika creates on the piano. Each night he waits for her to play and looses all his sorrows and worries in the rhythm of the notes. She manages to free him when she bares herself and her innermost desires to him and he sets them both free by escaping the asylum and embracing love.
