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The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

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But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius say this in Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”

Protagonists Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters are two 17 year old teenagers afflicted by cancer. They get acquainted at a cancer support group meeting. What follows is a sweet and sour story tasting like the Chinese dish of the same name.

John Green has reached out to us using Ethos, Pathos and Logos and brought out a blend of  Hope and Reality with plenty of humour and optimism of human beings in distress. The narrative has two interwoven streams, one of the suffering of the cancer victims and the other being the love story between the protagonist teenagers who face the stark reality of the disease with amazingly normal human emotions. Some parts of the narrative relating to the suffering and death of the cancer victims are not for the faint hearted. I could relate to Hazel who has a compromised lung and needs oxygen 24/7 because I am also in a similar situation as an asthma patient on oxygen day and night.

The bulk of the narrative is about a book that fascinates both Gus (Augustus) and Hazel. It is a book titled “An Imperial Affliction” by a Dutch author Peter Van Houten, which has a protagonist who dies at the end without a warning, half a sentence written and not completed. They arrange for a visit to Amsterdam, through charity organisations for cancer victims, to meet this reclusive author personally. They are accompanied by Hazel’s mother. The visit turns out to be very romantic for Hazel and Gus as they discover the pleasures of life together. On the other hand the main purpose of the visit becomes a failure. This is because author Van Houten is not only a recluse but also an eccentric who turns abusive towards the American Duo in spite of the attempts by his female secretary Lidewij Vliegenthart to calm him down. In this melee she quits her job as secretary of Van Houten.

The book is full of Machiavellian humour. The dialogues between Gus and Hazel are stark and humorous. Their will to live a full life and achieve even a transatlantic travel to Amsterdam is remarkable and to be emulated.

I enjoyed the book. Some of the notable dialogues are listed below.

“There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars”

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

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

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

Gus has the habit of keeping an unlit cigarette between his lips. “It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”

“Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence”

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