“The fault is not in our stars. Perhaps, it is death that is in their stars… the cancer that would lead them to their deaths.” chicsanders 2014

I've read one and a half novels of Mr. John Green. First was Looking for Alaska which I found to be a great read. After that splendid reading experience, I bought another of John Green’s books, An Abundance of Katherines. Halfway through, I stopped and felt this strong urge to throw the book in the garbage. The book has been kept in my bookcase with no plans of ever finishing that novel.  To put it bluntly, it’s one of the most horrible books I've ever read. Makes me wonder why it was ever published. 

I watched the movie The Fault in our Stars; I intentionally did not read the synopsis at the back nor did I try to find out who the writer was.  The Fault in our Stars, John Green’s sixth novel, "is narrated by Hazel Grace Lancaster, who met Gus, Augustus Waters in a cancer support group, which Hazel’s parents forced her to attend. Gus was an amputee and ex-basketball player. John Green’s inspiration for this novel came from a 16 year old girl, Esther Earl, who died from thyroid cancer. Green had wanted to show how life could be lived in full in spite of it being too short. While working as a student chaplain in a children’s hospital, Green was too angry at people dying young.  He felt the need to write about the complexities of the lives of these cancer stricken young people." 

The movie is about teenage romance and the young American adult is its target audience. It can be compared to Ali MacGraw & Ryan O’Neil’s Love Story, which portrays that all they needed was love and that real love can fix anything. Love may be a force that moves mountains. But NO dearie … love is not the be-all and end-all in life. Death is. Perhaps, it is death that is in their stars, the cancer that will lead them to their deaths.   There is no fault in their stars or ours.  Death is certain. It is inevitable. It is the remedy.

I've heard that the movie is a tear jerker and I tear up easily, but this movie definitely did not succeed in manipulating me to cry. I read this review by the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jun/19/fault-in-our-stars-review-john-green    My thoughts and sentiments expressed clearly by Peter Bradshaw.

There’s this part in the movie where Gus talked about oblivion. Oblivion meaning the state of being forgotten. Gus speaks at the support group and says, “I fear oblivion,” he said without a moment’s pause. “I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.” In the end, Gus realizes that to be loved deeply by just one person is more important than being loved widely.  That was their difference. Hazel does not care about being remembered and is not afraid of oblivion.

Green, at first, considered writing the novel at Isaac’s point of view but decided on writing it using Hazel’s point of view. It would have been good to have touched on different points of view … that of the mother, the father, or even that of the author Van Houten, who lost his 8 year old daughter to leukemia, which might just probably answer Hazel’s question… “What happens after?”

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 Quote: “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. …..

Quote: “I’m in love with you,” he said quietly. “Augustus,” I said. “I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasures of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have and I am in love with you.”

More quotes from the book that I really like:

 “The world is not a wish granting machine.”

“You’ll never know that your last day is your last good day.”

“I wanted to attend my own funeral.”

“Funerals are not for the dead, but for the living.”

“… like all love stories, our love story will die with us.”