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"