The Notebook

New Bern, I imagine Noah's house like this.

New Bern, a small Southern town on the river Neuse remains the lasting impression of the cute love story told by Nicholas Sparks in his award winning novel The Notebook.  This doesn't indicate that the novel is disposable. On the contrary it is a small novel that grows from a rather ordinary romantic novel to something special in the end. You rarely follow the happy couple through all those years when they lived happily until death did them apart. In this novel you do, the end of life with all its trials and tribulations is in fact tying this story together which embraces a life time from 1935 up until the 1990's when the happily ever aftr comes to its tragic and tender end.

In the end Sparks examines the process of falling in love in a way which I have never seen it penetrated before. To be able to depict romantic love with old people as the main characters must be as easy as doing it with young people, and yet there are so few novels about mature love.  Why so many novels and stories about young love and so few about life long love? I guess someone out there thinks that we want to read about young love all the time. However, most readers are not extremely young today and I predict that more novels will deal with similar subjects as this one.

I also hope that more novels will deal with age and sickness even if they are written for a young audience. Right now my pupils aged 16 and 17 read The Notebook. I hope they will remember it and that they get tools to confront old age when it comes to them, 60 years from reading this at school. 

Back to New Bern, why was that such a lasting impression of this novel?  Simply because my picture of a small river town in North Carolina was very vague and with this novel I felt that I got to know it a little bit. The life on the river, water fowl and kayaking plays an important part in the story and suddenly, for the first time in my life I feel an urge to go to North Carolina. Don't worry, this too will pass. 

This song creates a sound track suitable to this saga of neverending courtship that begins and ends when the ever after part is almost over. In fact, the love story in The Notebook is exactly like this: "I don't know if the suns gonna shine and I don't know if you'll ever be mine, but I make love to you anytime"

Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger

This semi-classic novel was an adventure to read with pupils in Upper Secondary School. They found themes and stories hidden in the text that we missed at the University. His Catholic friend, that everyone bullied but he secretly felt close to and secure with, although he didn't want to show him or the rest of the mob that he did. Did my pupils recognize a pattern in their own lives? 

The kid sister Phoebe was also a character they felt close to and she is amiable in every respect, feisty and kind at the same time. No wonder Holden trusts her and is willing to do everything to make her happy. She is fut´rthermore a rather rare character in a novel of this genre: "angry young man going frantic". In those novels you rarely meet any positive female characters.

My own strongest impression from the novel this time was that cruel treatment of upper class children has to do something with the ruling groups in society. To be a top dog is to begin your life unhappy, lost and lonely, friendless in spite of all the money. I hope all those boarding schools make Catcher in the Rye compulsory reading.

Dear Dorothea

Coming back.

I have neglected you for too long, so many griefs and bereavements got in between us, but now I am back and the reading has found me again, although most words are lost to me. I have not forgotten you, though, I still want to become more like you and those who made so much difference and still are buried in unvisited tombs.

I am currently reading about your literary brother, Silas Marner, he is conceived by the same parent as you, George Eliot. You will hear from him soon.

Greetings in Christ!

Grace in Practice by Paul M Zahl

The past month has turned my life up-side-down. First of all my father past away abruptly and unexpectedly. Secondly I've read about grace as the centre of God's intention with creation and human kind. Normally this blog deals with fiction, this book is theology. However, it brings out the qualities I look for in fictional literature; an envigorating language and depths of thought.

A quote may guide you to realize the genius of this book:

We are not born in community, nor do we die in community. We are single, alone. It is the first fact of human existence. Grace must speak to this.

Listen to Zahl here.