After about a week of trying to decide which book would start the new year (a delay aided by my need to finish grad school apps, which I swore I would finish before I was allowed to read for fun. Also a visit from my mother), I settled on not only a new book for me, but a book brand new to the world at large: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. The same day I bought this book, I also acquired a copy of The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, a book my coworkers had loved, and a book I was a week away from working a reading/signing event for.
I write to you today about both of these books, not because they are particularly similar in any form of story, character, or writing style, but because these are the books that started my new year in a most particular way, and did in fact make me excited to be alive, feeling all those emotions that you feel when in such a state, and did in fact cause me to consider and pursue again my own joy in creation and creativity.
The Fault in Our Stars (or TFiOS as the nerdfighters would call it, and I will too for brevity's sake) is a book of heartbreak and truth, one of the few books that has actually made me break into tears - though whether they were ones of sadness or joy I couldn't fully say (though sad is definitely a much less complex emotion, given the circumstances of the book). John Green spent 12 years writing a book about a teenage girl with cancer - specifically creating a girl, fully fledged and grown as a real living breathing person, sprung from his head as a person you know, who you want to know, whose despair and hope and love and ache you feel as your own, and whose life may be defined by cancer, but whose identity defines those around her. He wrote of Hazel, Hazel Grace , and the boy who walked into her life on one leg, Augustus Waters. It is a perfect story where the perfection is always false - but seeing and admitting that makes it somehow more genuine. It's a book of hope for the future, while knowing that the future has an end date sooner rather than later. It's a book about love and identity, and how to live when all you know is that you're dying - and how to live alongside those whose hearts you know you are going to break. It's written with the language of the everyday poetry of teenagers and lovers, dreamers and poets, words that I breathed in and out like Hazel's oxygen.
The Tiger's Wife, in contrast, is anything but a book of the everyday. Written in the US, it tells the stories of those who have lived through and are rebuilding after the wars in Eastern Europe. Love is a sidenote for a book about determining one's identity as part of a nation and community, about the physical and intangible remnants after death, about the search for mystery, for the stories and truths that show that there's more to life than what's around us. Tea Obreht surrounds her reader with a glittering ocean of words, the art of which both took my breath away (and caused me to subject an innocent bookshop full of people to an especially poetic passage about the dead, during an event mic check), while also causing me to despair that I would ever be able to wield words as beautifully as this. In the past and in the far past, in first hand accounts and second and third, all from the same voice, but telling stories she is further removed from, Obreht's Natalia explores mystery and reality, and the conflicts and battles of real life and war, and again of mystery to try and find her footing in a world she has inherited after her grandfather's passing.
These are two very different books: One of the everyday, one of the foreign (in many ways). One of youth and one of the old. One of the modern world of the US - and one of the old world. Yet somehow they are also complementary: both books are about realizing the value of your life in the face of death - one your own, the other those who've come before you. TFiOS brings hope in love, and the inexorability of life. The Tiger's Wife strives for hope in the mysteries of the magical stories of the past - but in the end is an affirmation of your own power and responsibility, to pick up the pieces even of the messes left by our forefathers, with or without reassurance of more beyond.
Each book left me bittersweet for numerous reasons, and despairing of my own talents for different reasons - but each also left me determined to dive back into my life, to make myself matter within my own world. And hey, led me to write at least this blog post, so it can't all be despair. You will devour TFiOS, addicted and in tears by the end. You will bask in wonder with The Tiger's Wife. You may like one or the other better - I know I did. But you won't regret reading them once you get there.
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