Our Fault

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John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars" - the best book read in recent time and the best one for analysis of the language, translation and everything else within it. There are rare people who do not feel moved by this book and I am glad that this time I am not one on them, but one of the majority.

A comment from Ingus Macats, the translator who done translation into Latvian language, 2013:
"Mūsu zvaigžņu vaina" lika man smieties, raudāt un domāt. Jā, romānā atspoguļotā tēma ir skumja, tomēr šis darbs nebūt nav depresīvs, tieši otrādi: varoņi ir asprātīgi un intelliģenti, nekautrēdamies plēst jokus arī dzīves smagākajos brīžos. Šī nav asaraina grāmata par vēzi, bet gan neliekuļots stāsts par jauniem cilvēkiem, kā arī viņu domu un jūtu pasauli. Autors grāmatu vienā vai citā formā rakstījis desmit gadus, un rezultāts ir katras dienas vērts.

The book is so much more than a typical cancer book. Similar as in the book found reference to a fictional book by Peter Van Houten An Imperial Affliction, also about Green's book with his own words can be said that "it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck." It is not a sappy love story, yet there is a love story indeed. The young adult book contains numerous reference and themes like the necessity of pain, fear of oblivion, injustice in the world (''life is not a wish-granting factory"), the importance of enjoying the moments and leaving a ''scar'' after which is more important than being done something heroic and being remembered by as much people as possible. What matters are  the relationships we form even when it means being a grenade with the power to tear everything apart.

Favorite quotes:
  • “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” 
  • “You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.” 
  • “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.” 
  • “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.” 
  • “Some people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said.
    "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.” 
  • “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” 
  • “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.” 
  • “You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.” 
  • “Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but a Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.” 
  • “But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” 
  • “The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.” 
  • “You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.”
  • “That's the thing about the pain, it demands to be felt.”
  • “Sober up. Write another novel. Do the thing you’re good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something.”

And countless more...

All in all, the book that changes you and motivates to write your own.




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