The fault in our stars

“That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a”

 

This is Hazel's description of the book she likes in the book- The fault in our stars. In summary it is a book of a girl suffering with lung cancer who has to roam around with oxygen cylinder and has an extended life owing to a medical miracle whose side effects are also eating her away. The book frequently refers to how everything is a side effect of death. Depression, agony, hope, nostalgia - everything. She meets a young amputee, a cancer survivor at her support group and they fall . I won't say in love because for some reason the way John Greene has portrayed it, love seems like a cliche to be used for this extraordinary story.

 

In brief the plot is of cancer ridden Hazel who meets Augustus (Gus) and the life that follows. Gus dies before she does due to relapse of his cancer. What is beautiful in the book is that it is neither a cancer story nor a love story. It is much more, maybe a life story. A small span of events define what they do, how they think, the helplessness of inevitable and hope of infinity. It is simply a theme of “You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”

 

When Gus is about to reveal to Hazel that his cancer has in fact relapsed, there is this paragraph which is so well written that i can't stop marveling. I can't also stop marvelling at how words, put together can ever express a feeling so well. It was hard to even identify that you feel it that way. Hazel says:

 

“Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but a Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.”

 

Gus is not a hero out of a romance book who says he would do anything to make his dying girl happy. He uses his wish (cancer perks of sick children) to take Hazel to Amsterdam to meet writer of her favorite book. She had long back used her wish on a trip to Disneyland. He says I kept my wish, almost like a 'wish hero' for the right thing. Her wish was his right thing after all...

 

 But let me submit that the real heroes of the Wish Factory are the young men and women who wait like Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot and good Christian Girls wait for marriage." (Do i say I have never heard of a better comparison, coming from my most cherished Beckett's play!)

 

What is truly magical is that for most of the book, you will smile at the humour of Gus and his subtle references. It makes you believe that one can joke about anything, even something as morbid as death.

 

What is also magical is the fact that there are two people, afraid to be with each other, afraid to confess their love since they know they are short of time and still how they face it, not bravely or anything, just ordinarily. Or maybe not, they live as if it will be forever, as they know it isn't...As we all know it isn't. There is an understanding of being meaningless. No pretense of any absurd ambition on pretext of existentialism.

 

Why I loved this book is because Greene has perfectly mastered the art of describing how one is feeling. When Gus dies, Hazel says, I didn't know what to do, who to talk to, where to vent it; She says,“The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death with was Augustus Waters.”  This is so true. One doesn't not mourn some one's death, but maybe missing how someone made them feel. She says "The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with."

 

And I admire the inference of love- "...and I was beginning to suspect that even if death didn't get in the way, the kind of love Augustus and I share could never last. So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay"  I think I agree. Recently someone told me that love can never really last. It is one look in someone's eyes, that you maybe see for a split second. That, like orgasm is something you know is true if you feel it- there are no two ways about it...and that is the reason to believe, if there ever is a reason. I agree.

The book ends with Gus writing a letter to Hazel's favorite writer to write her eulogy on his behalf- to make it perfect. "I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.”

 

The book, in all fairness revolves around one sentence, quoted often, and always more apt than the last time- “The world is not a wish-granting factory.”

***

 

Best quotes:

 

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”

 

“Sometimes people don’t understand

the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.

Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course.

But you keep the promise anyway. That’s

what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?”

 

“Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”

 

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

 

“You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.”

 

“The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives.”