As the name suggests, a Paper Town is a non-existent, phantom and fake town, as if made of paper.
The literal meaning of the term ‘Paper Town’ refers to a metaphorical name given to a fake place that has been embedded in a map by the map’s creator, in order to protect the copyright for their map. Sometimes these are called as the ‘copyright traps’. People and companies that create or design maps, typically insert one or multiple Paper Towns in their maps, so that if someone steals, copies or plagiarizes their map, they will be instantly caught, because, a Paper Town has no real existence after all.
This novel, Paper Towns by John Green, brings into action, an animating storyscape set forth in a town zigzagging along the city streets of Florida and featuring a bunch of interesting characters, primarily a batch of school-going teenyboppers studying in Winter Park High School and about to finish their school years.
The novel is an invigorating work of fiction, mainly combining the themes of mystery, young adulthood, romance and Bildungsroman, which refers to ‘a progressive spiritual transformation or a series of major internal shifts in a character’.
In this case, this character is Quentin. The novel pronounces itself with a series of events that occur in the life of the protagonist character named Quentin, thereby, bringing out this transformative inner shift within him.
This boy, named Quentin Jacobsen, known by his buddies as ‘Q’, is a high-school going boy who seems to have an infatuating crush on a girl named Margo Roth Speigelman.
Quentin loved all-things Margo, and Margo loved all things adventures and mysteries.
However, Margo, who loved adventures and mysteries, one day disappeared all of a sudden, turning into a mystery herself, as she left a series of clues for Quentin to be able to solve the mystery and discover her. And Quentin devoted himself to solving this mystery, the mystery of the lost paper girl.
The trove of clues included a book of Walt Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass with lines of the poem The Song of Myself, highlighted with a coloured highlighter.
The character of Quentin is seen in the novel to be clutching the book of poetry with him at all times, hunched and steeped over the collected clues, wandering his way through the city streets and abandoned ruins, jutting the best of his brains studying maps and browsing a reference encyclopedia managed by his friend and classmate Radar.
In addition to Radar, the circle of his closest friends included a boy named Ben and a girl named Lacey.
The three of them left no stone unturned to decipher the clues left by Margo, and by the end, this happens!
Together with Ben, Radar and Lacey, Quentin sped off in his minivan, driving to a paper town named Agloe, in the most unusual and strange manner, on the day of their school’s graduation and farewell ceremony.
However, not until the end of this search was he able to realize that he wasn’t actually searching her, rather all this time he had been searching an idea, the idea he thought was her, but it wasn’t.
Apparently, the image he had for her was as fake as the idea of a paper town,
and the moment this image was shattered, his attraction and fascination for Margo eventually began to evaporate and fall away, collapsing and crumbling like balls of crumpled paper, an illusory fallacy breaking apart…It was not the love that was breaking apart but rather what he thought and understood to be the concept of ‘love’.
Another interesting scenario that the book depicts, is how seeking to discover his dear friend Margo, Quentin immersed himself in reading over and over the highlighted passages of Walt Whitman’s poetry, deciphering, interpreting and trying to make sense, of what possible clue was Margo leaving, while highlighting these lines of poetry.
But as he realized in the end, all the interpretations still and all, were about who he was and how he thought, more than who Margo was and what she thought. Learning which, he is depicted in the book to be pondering over this insight: That, the way we think about the other person reveals more about who we are than about who the other person is.
The novel is divided into three main parts, which are titled as The Strings, The Grass and The Vessel respectively, each containing a number of chapters.
While the storyline begins with notes scurrying with a jovial nostalgia and plenty of cornball humour, by the end, it dissolves into an outpouring torrent of emotions, streaming, welling and shining with intense spiritual exuberance, leaving the readers with some profound insights to ponder and dwell into.
One such insight being the discrimination between an idea and the reality. Another being a realization, that not until we get to have something that we thought we desperately wanted, is that we come to know that we didn’t really want it in the first place. We wanted something else.
It was never the destination that mattered, it was the journey of the search. The journey is the way. The search is the finding. The means is the end.
The character of Quentin Jacobsen has been depicted to arrive at these understandings while navigating the span of this storyline…
By losing himself in the search of her, he ended up losing her but finding himself.
In the same spirit, when we lose ourselves to something which is greater than our personal identity, our limited paper towns, only then the journey itself marks the thrill of experience.
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The literal meaning of the term ‘Paper Town’ refers to a metaphorical name given to a fake place that has been embedded in a map by the map’s creator, in order to protect the copyright for their map. Sometimes these are called as the ‘copyright traps’. People and companies that create or design maps, typically insert one or multiple Paper Towns in their maps, so that if someone steals, copies or plagiarizes their map, they will be instantly caught, because, a Paper Town has no real existence after all.
This novel, Paper Towns by John Green, brings into action, an animating storyscape set forth in a town zigzagging along the city streets of Florida and featuring a bunch of interesting characters, primarily a batch of school-going teenyboppers studying in Winter Park High School and about to finish their school years.
The novel is an invigorating work of fiction, mainly combining the themes of mystery, young adulthood, romance and Bildungsroman, which refers to ‘a progressive spiritual transformation or a series of major internal shifts in a character’.
In this case, this character is Quentin. The novel pronounces itself with a series of events that occur in the life of the protagonist character named Quentin, thereby, bringing out this transformative inner shift within him.
This boy, named Quentin Jacobsen, known by his buddies as ‘Q’, is a high-school going boy who seems to have an infatuating crush on a girl named Margo Roth Speigelman.
Quentin loved all-things Margo, and Margo loved all things adventures and mysteries.
However, Margo, who loved adventures and mysteries, one day disappeared all of a sudden, turning into a mystery herself, as she left a series of clues for Quentin to be able to solve the mystery and discover her. And Quentin devoted himself to solving this mystery, the mystery of the lost paper girl.
The trove of clues included a book of Walt Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass with lines of the poem The Song of Myself, highlighted with a coloured highlighter.
The character of Quentin is seen in the novel to be clutching the book of poetry with him at all times, hunched and steeped over the collected clues, wandering his way through the city streets and abandoned ruins, jutting the best of his brains studying maps and browsing a reference encyclopedia managed by his friend and classmate Radar.
In addition to Radar, the circle of his closest friends included a boy named Ben and a girl named Lacey.
The three of them left no stone unturned to decipher the clues left by Margo, and by the end, this happens!
Together with Ben, Radar and Lacey, Quentin sped off in his minivan, driving to a paper town named Agloe, in the most unusual and strange manner, on the day of their school’s graduation and farewell ceremony.
However, not until the end of this search was he able to realize that he wasn’t actually searching her, rather all this time he had been searching an idea, the idea he thought was her, but it wasn’t.
Apparently, the image he had for her was as fake as the idea of a paper town,
and the moment this image was shattered, his attraction and fascination for Margo eventually began to evaporate and fall away, collapsing and crumbling like balls of crumpled paper, an illusory fallacy breaking apart…It was not the love that was breaking apart but rather what he thought and understood to be the concept of ‘love’.
Another interesting scenario that the book depicts, is how seeking to discover his dear friend Margo, Quentin immersed himself in reading over and over the highlighted passages of Walt Whitman’s poetry, deciphering, interpreting and trying to make sense, of what possible clue was Margo leaving, while highlighting these lines of poetry.
But as he realized in the end, all the interpretations still and all, were about who he was and how he thought, more than who Margo was and what she thought. Learning which, he is depicted in the book to be pondering over this insight: That, the way we think about the other person reveals more about who we are than about who the other person is.
The novel is divided into three main parts, which are titled as The Strings, The Grass and The Vessel respectively, each containing a number of chapters.
While the storyline begins with notes scurrying with a jovial nostalgia and plenty of cornball humour, by the end, it dissolves into an outpouring torrent of emotions, streaming, welling and shining with intense spiritual exuberance, leaving the readers with some profound insights to ponder and dwell into.
One such insight being the discrimination between an idea and the reality. Another being a realization, that not until we get to have something that we thought we desperately wanted, is that we come to know that we didn’t really want it in the first place. We wanted something else.
It was never the destination that mattered, it was the journey of the search. The journey is the way. The search is the finding. The means is the end.
The character of Quentin Jacobsen has been depicted to arrive at these understandings while navigating the span of this storyline…
By losing himself in the search of her, he ended up losing her but finding himself.
In the same spirit, when we lose ourselves to something which is greater than our personal identity, our limited paper towns, only then the journey itself marks the thrill of experience.
Wrapping up the review with a small poem…
This life is a great paper town,
and we, we are these little-little paper humans,
crumpled and crinkled,
waddling and fluttering,
amidst these paper towns,
trying to navigate through,
constantly getting pulled by invisible strings,
as if some teeny-tiny puppets,
relishing the bright golden sunlight of the golden green meadows,
desiring for a dream to last forever,
locked inside our own vessels,
but soon enough discovering our vessels cracking open,
and the illusion of our fallacies fading away…
which leaves us questioning and wondering,
the purpose of all of this, of all this seeking and running,
losing and finding, finding and losing it again,
wanting something and then all of a sudden not
wanting it anymore,
losing something, finding it and then wanting to lose it all over again
Life is a paper town and we are paper humans…
How fragile, how vulnerable,
and at the same time, how powerful, how impeccable
How illogical and disorderly,
and at the same time, how perfect, how mathematical!
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