Three Books: Veronika Decides to Die, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, We Need to Talk About Kevin

The books I’ve chosen are Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die, John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin.

Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho


Summary
Written by the amazing Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides To Die tells the story of a young Slovenian woman, Veronika, who decides to take her life. Though her life nearly perfect, she believes that life will not get better and is thus not worth living for. She decides to take several sleeping pills. Her suicide plan fails, and she finds herself in Villete, a mental institution. Told that she only has a few days to live, Veronika decides to either kill herself properly or escape to do it. 

However, she starts to develop a newfound will to live. She finds companionship with other patients in the hospital and falls in love with Eduard, who is schizophrenic.  She realizes that her incoming death has empowered her with the freedom to experience everything and anything without repercussion – She has nothing to lose. Eventually, it is revealed that she was never dying. The news of her imminent death was intended as a psychiatric experiment to help her reacquire the will to live and love. Talk about placebo!

As a school text
Veronika Decides to Die would be a wonderful book for students to read and study. The stigma of mental illness is taboo and rarely discussed in the classroom; Coelho’s masterpiece provides an incredibly honest representation of what is usually a very difficult and intimate issue to approach. The humanity and endearing nature of each of Villete’s patients demand readers to reconsider what they understand as mental illness; they blur the line between sanity and insanity. This uncertain boundary is best expressed by Dr Igor, who runs Villete: He comments that reality is “whatever the majority deems it to be. It’s not necessarily the best or the most logical, but it’s the one that has become adapted to the desires of society as a whole.” That’s the human condition right there.

I’m convinced that students will easily identify with Veronika’s struggle with apathy and passivity – or at least be reminded about their own thirst for life. The intimate back-stories of each character, the search for freedom from the trappings of a world that doesn’t understand, the contradictory desire to find acceptance – these are all experiences relevant to students. Few books are able to express an appreciation of life as honestly or genuinely as this one.

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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

Summary
Written by John Boyne in 2007, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a book commonly prescribed to students as a literary text. It takes place at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and depicts the unlikely friendship between Bruno, an ignorant German child, and Schmuel, a Jewish child prisoner. Meeting daily along the fence that borders Auschwitz, Bruno and Schmuel find common ground through their conversations, and help each other through extenuating circumstances. Eventually, in order to help with the search for Schmuel’s father (and to satisfy his own need for an adventure), Bruno decides to sneak into the camp with Schmuel, dressed in the uniform of the Auschwitz prisoners. Mistaken as another prisoner, he is gassed to death.


As a school text
To be honest, I’m shocked by the popularity of this book in our school curriculum. I’m not going to mince my words – I found it painfully unrewarding. As a story drawn from one of the world’s most horrific genocides, it couldn’t be more unplausible or offensive. Boyne ignores critical details – like the fact that Auschwitz’s fences were electrically charged, constantly patrolled, and impassable – for the sake of satisfying plot development. Auschwitz wasn’t a place where prisoners could spend hours chatting up their friends next to the fence. To portray the concentration camp as relaxed and mildly miserable is unforgivable; to introduce such books to students is to encourage them that genocide can be taken lightly, that Holocaust was quite all right because even the son of Nazi commandants can be friends with Jewish prisoners.

The only redeeming factor in the book is that it is quite the perfect allegory of the larger apathetic German society during World War II. Bruno’s ignorance, as frustrating as it was to witness, is representative of a Germany that chose to close its eyes to Nazi cruelty. However, the story is so reliant on the stupidity of its characters, that its satirical effect is ultimately ruined.

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We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Summary
Written by Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin describes tells the aftermath and the preceding events of a fictional high-school massacre committed by a student, Kevin Khatchadourian. The story is told in first person, and exists in the form of a series of letters from Eva, Kevin’s mother, to her estranged husband. The story is non-linear, and jumps between Eva’s life and rejection by her community in the aftermath of the massacre, and Eva’s recounts of her turbulent relationships with her husband and with her son. 

Kevin’s behavior is likely to be psychopathic. Though his condition is never diagnosed or directly discussed, Kevin lacks empathy and often engages in acts of aggression and sadism towards his mother. The account of the actual massacre is not discussed till the end of the book: it is revealed that Kevin had shot his father before shooting his classmates. Eva’s letters – the entire book – would never be read.

The novel concludes with a final meeting between Eva and Kevin, before he is transferred to an adult penitentiary. It is then that Eva acknowledges that despite everything, she finds in herself the ability to love her son.

As a school text
I would love to see this book as a literary text in schools. We Need To Talk About Kevin provides such fantastic insight into the modern crisis of terrorism, especially in the aftermath of notable school shootings at Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech. It could kickstart some excellent conversations about the role of violence in schools. 

As a piece for critical analysis, We Need To Talk About Kevin would hold up beautifully. An unreliable narrator, Eva’s narration is jagged and confusing, reflecting her internal struggle to resolve her hatred for Kevin with her love for him. The strained relationship between Kevin and Eva is honest and heart-breaking; the exemplification of painful ambivalence in a mother-son relationship dominated by society's expectation of a perfect family. Eva’s unsympathetic attitude towards her son reminds students that even a mother’s love should not be taken for granted.