Nemesis by Philip Roth - Summary

This is a book that I really hated but the last two or three pages were really worth reading. If you're an avid reader, in your late twenties or early thirties and you have heard about it or were planning to read it, I'd highly advice you not to waste your time. Instead you might want to read the below summary for an overall look about the story and spare yourself the boredom I felt. I have no personal issue with the author or anything, this was the first book I read by him but I was disappointed beyond description.

Keywords: Polio, war, love, tragedy, guilt

 The book cover is one of the most appealing I have ever came across, so was the title but the latter wasn't really very linked to the story

Summary: It is 1944 and Newark is having one of the hottest summers. The country is facing both war and a polio epidemic. No one knows what causes Polio and there is no treatment for it yet. Bucky Cantor, a 23 year old lost his mother as a child and was raised by his grandparents. They made sure he gets a very good education and that he grows up to be a very well mannered man unlike his father was. They also teach him to be strong and count on himself. He grows fund of physical training realizing its importance in building one up and eventually becomes a physical education teacher. Despite his physical aptness, being a weight lifter and a javelin thrower, he still fails to join the army because of his poor site. He is appointed however as playground director in the Jewish Weequahic section of the city. Polio has not reached this section. But the disease will burst right after a group of Italians pay a visit to the playground where Bucky trains the kids. Some kids die, others get paralyzed. Panic takes over the families; few stop letting their kids outside the house, others ask for the playground to be shut and some directly blame Bucky for their kids’ illness or death. Bucky’s fiancé Marcia, worried about him, tries constantly to convince him to stay away from the kids in the city. She eventually succeeds at finding him a job with her at the summer camp in the Poconos. He first hesitates because he is the only one to take care of his grandmother but then upon her encouragement, he accepts and quits his job as playground director. Bucky is very affected by the blaming fingers people are pointing at him. He is also affected by the children’s deaths or paralysis not to forget his shame of not being able to join the war. He definitely needed to take a break from his city and this disease and joining his fiancé seemed as the perfect solution. He was also planning on asking her to marry him, after he got the approval of her parents. At the camp, Bucky now a changed man, questions the existence of God, blames him and this has negative repercussions on his relationship with this fiancé. What makes it even worse is the death of his best friend at war. But miraculously, Bucky steps out of his negativity after an encounter with a butterfly and he realizes how much satisfying his job is “there could be no more satisfying job for a man than giving a boy learning a sport. Along with the basic instruction, the security and confidence that all will be well and getting him over the fear of new experience” and decides to go back to his playground director duties. At the same time, some of the kids at the camp, including Marcia’s sister, contract Polio and so Bucky suspects he is the carrier of Polio that brought the disease with him to camp. It turns out to be true, but he survives Polio only to be left with a deformation in his spine and leg with partial disability. He also breaks up with Marcia “I owed her freedom”. In 1971, one of Bucky’s students at the playground bumps into him in the streets and finds out that Bucky never forgave himself for being a Polio carrier, and live all these years alone as means of punishment. To his student and many others however, Bucky the javelin thrower, have always and remained “Hercules”, “the strongest man on earth”, the “invincible”.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - Summary

Keywords: Dystopia, revolution, freedom, love, happiness

Summary: “WE” is a story about revolution mounted by people living in the “Onestate” which is the only state to exist in the future. This state was established after the 200-Years war between the City and the Country and is limited by a green wall. A benefactor is the absolute ruler of the Onestate and people in it are referred to as male and female numbers. Everything in this state has been calculated to ensure happiness of all numbers and therefore hunger and love, the rulers of the primitive world were both eliminated. All numbers have also been granted equal rights and duties and all their acts performed, including sexual ones are planned ahead and scheduled in a similar way for everybody. On a regular day for example, numbers work the same amount of time, each performing his/her own task, they sleep at the same hour and anyone can mate with a number of his/ her choice.  There’s no place for envy or jealousy in the Onestate. Moreover, no one is allowed to get late to work or lie or disobey. The state is strict about such behaviors and a severe punishment system is established for those who do not follow the law. It is through the diaries of the main character, a male number called D-503, the only mathematician in this state that we learn about the Onestate and all the events happening in it. We’ll also discover as the story continues that contradictory to all expectations, this predicted perfect life is not satisfying to all numbers because the absence of freedom which was purposefully abrogated for there is a negative relationship between freedom and happiness. Free people according to D-503 are considered the savage primitive people, the ancestors of the now civilized, evolved, wise numbers that reside in the Onestate.  Nevertheless, for a group of numbers in the Onestate the “Mephi”, freedom turns out to be more valuable than all the comfort one can offer. To this end, they have elaborated a plan to overthrow the system in this Onestate by not accepting to re-elect the benefactor on Election Day. Their leader; a female number named I-330 also gets D-503 to help them out without him really knowing. D-503 is an engineer that has built an Integral which is a sort of a machine of great importance for the well-being of the Onestate. D-503 has always been a perfect citizen but one encounter only with I-330 was enough to destabilize him. He starts getting dreams, he gets jealous and he is dragged unwillingly into helping I-330. He breaks many laws but is never caught because he is protected by the friends of I-330. He eventually realizes that the world does not end outside the green wall and that many people chose to cross over there for a free life. He also learns that freedom is contagious. Unfortunately, the coup d’état to overthrow the benefactor and liberate the numbers fails, and members of Mephi get arrested. D-503 accepts to be treated of his disease the “dreams” and “imagination” which he thinks caused all his awkward behavior and disobedience. His treatment is some kind of a lobotomy. I-330 on the other hand refuses and she is tortured in front of D-503 who is now indifferent to her. After all the punishment and torture, I-330 DOES NOT GIVE UP and her final message to D-503 and maybe to every one of us is that “The number of revolutions is infinite”, as long as there are numbers, there will be revolutions.

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green - Summary

Keywords: Cancer fighting, love of literature, love, last wish, traveling, death, life

Summary: The story of this book is told by Hazel, a 16 years old girl who has been fighting thyroid cancer since she was 13. Hazel’s chances of survival are slight because her lungs have started to shut down. The doctors however, are trying to save her life by giving her a new trial drug which has shown promising effects against tumor metastasis. In the meantime, Hazel has to use a permanent oxygen support, i.e. an oxygen tank cart to perform the simplest task in life: breathing.

Life is hard on Hazel to say the least but this will all change when she meets 17 years old Augustus Waters, an osteosarcoma survivor who has lost his leg in the fight. Hazel and Augustus both like reading, although they have completely opposite tastes in books. Cancer and reading will bring them together and they will fall in love with one another. "As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." Among the reads they exchange, there is “An imperial affliction”, a book which does not have an ending, but rather just stops in the middle of a sentence. Being a sort of a diary written by a girl with blood cancer who is trying to find out whether the man who wants to marry her mother is a crook or not, this book is Hazel’s favorite as she finds “It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence”. Augustus will eventually arrange a trip to Prague for him and Hazel to meet the recluse author of “An imperial affliction” who promised to tell them the ending; or what happens to the rest of the characters after the protagonist dies. The encounter turns out to be a fiasco but the trip itself is the miracle that both Hazel and Augustus never expected to happen.

At the end, one is shocked to learn that Augusts’ condition was far worse than Hazel’s and that his last act before dying was to fulfill Hazel’s wish. In return she also gets to make his wish come true, by reading him his eulogy before he dies so he gets to see his own funeral in a way. Needless to say, the risk of tears expected while reading this book and this passage in particular is significantly high.

 “The fault in our stars” strength lies in the fact that Hazel, Augustus and other characters expose to us how society sees cancer patients and how they see themselves. They are not always courageous and tough. “People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.” They are not always nice; some are mean or get mean because they have to deal with cancer or because of their cancer type. “Asshole Tumor, because it turns you into a monster”. Cancer is sometimes harder on the parents than the patients. For instance, the whole lifestyle of a family changes to cope with cancer, and the strongest member of the family, the father that is, might not necessarily be the strongest at facing the fact that his own child has cancer. But we also learn that family suffering is what drives cancer patients to fight and act strong as Hazel puts it when she’s talking about her mother “Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled.”  Finally, it was very hard for me to know that the worst fear of cancer patients is to fall in love and to let people get attached to them because they feel like grenades that are going to explode sooner or later and that when they do there will be no glory in that and no single painting in museums to remember them like warriors at battles and many other deaths are remembered. “There is no glory in sickness … There is no honor in dying of.”