Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Imagine peering into the very heart of the mystical rose in Dante’s Paradise and finding the neon injunction: “TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.”Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Laing and prosy homiletics (“It’s what you are, not what others make of you”) that seem to have been cribbed from a high-school health textbook. Regrettably, however, Coelho, preaching the need to live your own life in the face of death and social regimentation, can’t resist capping these often poignant stories with sanity-is-the-true-madness insights out of R.D. Eduard, a “schizophrenic” whose case seems most like Coelho’s, is an ambassador’s son who ended up in Villette after rejecting a diplomatic career to paint. Mari, a lawyer who committed herself because she was suffering from panic attacks, has been asymptomatic for years but, divorced and forced into retirement, has nothing left to return to. Serbian Zedka Mendel, lacking a necessary brain chemical, endures megadoses of insulin that send her into comas. Initially rebelling against her keepers’ solicitous rules and regulations (``I'm not here to preserve my life, but to lose it,” she reminds a nurse), she finds first her curiosity and then, gradually, her passions aroused by her fellow patients. She awakens in Villette, Slovenia’s notorious lunatic asylum, to learn that she’s damaged her heart irreparably and has only a week to live. Here, he returns to the world of mental hospitals indirectly via Veronika, a Ljubljana librarian who-tired of the fact that, at 24, she already finds every day like every other and can’t imagine any future but increasing boredom, decay, and death-takes an overdose of sleeping pills. A touching, if overexplicit, fable about learning to live in the face of death.Īs he confides in an early chapter, Coelho himself ( The Fifth Mountain, 1998, etc.) was apparently institutionalized simply because his adolescent behavior baffled his parents.
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