Alaska analysed

There are some books which ruffle your feathers..in a good way!I stand here,my feathers uprooted. I did not buy this book,I read it online after coming across it in the most funny way.I was sitting jobless in office having shut out myself to the Gulti banter of my colleagues. And was surfing the net,reading stuff on Google Reader.In a funny picture,there was a note scribbled inside some wretched instalment of the Twilight series,urging the readers to please not read it and go look for other books in the huge sea of literature.One name mentioned there was Alaska by John Green.The title is Looking for Alaska btw.So I decided to give it a look,and directly got the pdf on the net.
So here it goes
The book got me reeling,and made me type this. This is rarer than the appearance of the Haley’s Comet .But something about this book,touched my heart deep down.It is not a literary masterpiece,deemed even offensive by some(read it on wiki),it isn’t like I have the ultimate authority on literary masterpieces.But the writing is fluid,very conversant,almost mundane yet very engaging. The zen of life as it is called is conveyed in the most subtle form,but does not answer any definitive questions and lives it open to the readers interpretation,just like a good book should.Let the reader develop her own idea and opinion instead of inculcating one.The backdrop is the Culver State School and the lives of 16 something high school students.The narrator is a social Nobody who leaves his Florida home for Alabama hoping for the ‘Greater perhaps’ ,a hope having actual friends. He has a penchant for Famous last words of famous dead people.In school he becomes friends with Colonel,Takumi,Lara and the larger than life Alaska.He gets introduced to the hard ways of boarding school,the rich kid poor kid divide,the vices of adult life and also to the base system(albeit the male female interaction one).And in all of this there is Alaska,the child woman who makes absolutely no qualms about drinking,smoking having sex and basically lives her life on her own terms.But she has a bitter past as most of these larger than life characters do.But she is not hung up on it and lives life each day. Tragedy strikes in their happy lives and the narrator is kept lurking in the dark thinking that it was his own fault.
How do you get out of this labyrinth of suffering we call life?Is the question posed by the narrator lot of times as well as answered in different ways.This made me realise ,all we do is play Cat and Mouse. All the achievements, happiness in our lives are actually vaccine shots to make us immune to the misgivings in life.But are we immune.I don’t think as humans we are.Because beyond life and death ,in clinical terms ,beyond having a body,we also have what is intellect-emotional and cognitive.It learns from experiences,forms opinions,adheres to philosophies,follows religions,practices arts.So what happens to this intellect after we die.In the exchange between mass and energy what happens to this massive life force which in living life,the only thing which seperates us from one another.Is it just another signal transferred between neurons?
Our getting mad at someone because he or she does not call,my efforts to form coherent sentences here out of random words, My inability to understand my part in the scheme of things is a suffering for me.
This book left me wondering..what will I remembered for after my death.Am I even worth remembering?
I want to be Alaska.