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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment