The fault in our stars- a review

 

“What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. 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.” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

 

 

With its movie coming out and the world wide hype surrounding it i decided to pick this book up finally. I have never been the person who likes tear jerking romantic ballads with sad endings and with the book’s back cover review clearly hinting me the same i convinced myself not to pick it up. But i guess curiosity got the better of me. Anyways I sat on my bed at night with my nice cuppa of hot coffee and began.

The first thing I noticed was the protagonist aka Hazel Grace was not just surviving  terminal cancer but her whole life (whatever was left of it) was focused around it. Her support group forms an integral part of her daily schedule that will eventually change her outlook towards life . she is living her routine life with her doting mother and little-more-than-comfortable-emotional father when one fine day she meets a talk lanky (read-Augustus Waters) boy in the group and her life takes a complete turn. This boy ; who has a prosthetic leg thanks to the spreading cancer; tells Hazel , and by extension the reader, that life is what you make of it. U can either sit at brood incessantly that why it happened to you, or can simply run out to the world and live each moment (be it happy or sad) with utmost exaggeration. He portrays Max Mayhem with equal panache ( dies gallantly at every game he and his blind friend Isaac play) and easily floors with his impromptu quotes from the book “An Imperial Affliction” by Peter Van houten. Hazel and Gus have adventures together which vary from a scale from we-are-going-for-a-picnic-to-watch-funky-bones to my-wish-before-dying-is-to-visit-Amsterdam-with-you. The story goes on with its sweet simple pace until they come back and realize that Augustus is way more sick than Hazel and their whole world just falls apart……

For me the book was too emotionally overwhelming for many reasons. First of all if you have had someone in your life dealing with cancer you would understand the pain you go through to watch them slip away from you and no matter what you do you realize that there is nothing you can do about it except to maybe prolong their misery. “thats the thing about pain..it demands to be felt.”

I also thought the usage of the book “An Imperial Affliction” in the context was brilliant which almost made me belief in the existence of the book which sadly it isn’t.“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”  It tells about a girl with terminal cancer( no surprises there), her family n friends, mysterious Dutch Tulip guy and a heroic hamster . But the book abruptly stops as the girl is presumed dead. The book exquisitely draws parallel between how life is unpredictable and one should always keep filling the pages of their book.

But the thing that won my heart most was the simple love story that existed between the two. It is the sweet simple things in life which are the real ones after all. thats how life should be. Everyone has their share of drama and everyone needs to deal with that on their own. But when you find that special someone who makes you feel complete is when you realised to did something right to have found them. A beautiful quote from the book sums it all up :-

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”

 

So get out. Do something new, feel something inside you, choose the people who can hurt you, but never ever have any regrets in your life!!!