By Paulo Coelho
This is the procedure adopted by circus trainers to ensure that elephants never rebel - and I suspect that it is also what happens with a lot of people.
When still a baby, the elephant is tethered by a very thick rope to a stake firmly hammered into the ground. The elephant tries several times to get free, but it lacks the strength to do so.
After a year, the stake and the rope are still strong enough to keep a small elephant tethered, although it continues to try, unsuccessfully, to get free. At this point, the animal realises that the rope will always be too strong and so it gives up.
When it reaches adulthood, the elephant can still remember how, for a long time, it had wasted its energies trying to escape captivity. At this stage, the trainer can tether the elephant with a slender thread tied to a broom handle, and the elephant will make no attempt to escape to freedom.
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I polished off this quick read in two days on the beach. I initially picked it up as one of the “buy two, get one free” deal at Barnes and Noble, mainly because I liked Coelho’s other book, “The Alchemist.” This book takes place over approximately one week, and begins with the main character, Veronika, attempting suicide. Her reasons aren’t extraordinary; she’s not seriously depressed (although some would argue that she must be in order to try to kill herself), she hasn’t had any recent crises, she’s young, attractive, employed, sociable. She simply feels that her life has become stagnant, and suicide is her solution. She takes four packs of sleeping pills, one by one, and drifts into a coma from which she awakens days later to find that she’s not dead, but in a mental hospital. She’s told by the head physician that her heart was severely damaged while she was in the coma, and that she has less than a week to live. Despite being given medicine to “prolong” her life, she experiences several attacks and symptoms of heart failure during the ensuing days. The book shows how this information affects not only Veronika, but several of the other patients as well, and clarifies the differences in the realities of the “sane” and those of the “insane.” I appreciated the progression of events and character development as each person evolved, and found the story not depressing, but uplifting.
Parts of this book were inspired by actual events in Coelho’s life. He was in a mental hospital three times in the sixties, and while he never wrote directly about them, this was his way of incorporating his experiences into a book.
Netflix rating? 4/5 stars.
This Article’s written by Andrea. Please, visit Steph and Andrea’s blog to read more from them.
