The same could be said of Coelho, who was a playwright, theatre director, songwriter and record company executive before finally settling down as a writer at the age of 40. None of them are dangerous, except possibly to themselves: they are simply looking for their place in the world. There she meets Mari, a former lawyer prone to panic attacks, depressive wife and mother Zedka and schizophrenic Eduard, the frustrated artist with whom she falls in love. Veronika Decides to Die is the story of a young librarian in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana who fails to make the most of her life and attempts to end it with an overdose of sleeping pills, only to wake up in a mental hospital. I never saw myself as a victim of life." You could almost say Coelho's parents did him a favour: his stays in Rio de Janeiro's Dr Eiras Sanatorium inspired his latest book, which has just been published in Britain. His mother died six years ago, but he has told his father, a retired engineer, that he bears neither of them any ill will.
It wasn't that they wanted to hurt me, but they didn't know what to do."Ĭoelho is now 52, the author of half a dozen books that have together sold some 26m copies. I used to read a lot, I was very shy and I didn't socialise very easily_ And, well, I was the first of a new generation, so they were afraid I would be a bad influence on my cousins, my sister and everybody else. "My parents thought I was psychotic," says Coelho, who is now one of the world's most popular living authors, published in 119 countries. He wanted to do something arty with his life.
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