John Green was once a little evasive when it comes to the question of whether or not — the book over which Hazel and Gus fall head-over-heels in — is 'real.' The answer you're probably looking for is that, no, An Imperial Affliction is not a book that exists in full in our corporeal world; you cannot find it at your local bookstore or on Amazon. Van Houten is, yes, an invention of Green's for the purpose of the themes and story of — as is the epigraph to TFiOS, an apparent quote from An Imperial Affliction: “As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the ocean: ‘Conjoiner rejoinder poisoner concealer revelator. Look at it, Rising up and rising down, taking everything with it.’ ‘What’s that?’ Anna asked. ‘Water,’ the Dutchman said. ‘Well, and time.’ — Peter Van Houten, An Imperial Affliction In a blog post from two years ago who'd nailed down the origin of An Imperial Affliction's title — the Emily Dickinson poem — to wax (kind of) poetic on 'reality' in relation to the epitaph: I’m not going on record as to whether the quotation from Peter van Houten’s novel An Imperial Affliction used as the epigraph to The Fault in Our Stars is “real,” because to do so would mean bringing up all kinds of questions about what constitutes “real” when you’re talking about fictions. But there’s no question that the title of An Imperial Affliction is indeed taken from this poem.
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