THE NOTEBOOK

• by Nicholas Sparks
• [rated by pbs viewers as #56]
• 207 pages

Written in 1999, The Notebook was one of a tripod of books remembered at that time, that typified a softer,

gentler way of wrestling with love. The three legs would have to be this one, Bridges of Madison County and the third leg was everything written that tried to be the other two!

I’m not sure if I read this. I know I saw the movie back when. The story of two lovers for life, they meet in high school, fall in love, are separated by her moving and her mother hiding all the love letters he sent her afterwards.

Then they meet again, fall in love again and then the book switches to old age where they have been together for life, she now has Alzheimer’s and he stays by her side, though she doesn’t recognize him.

Oh, I’m sorry, did I give it away? I kinda doubt it. Because anyone alive at that time remembers the story of the Notebook, however vaguely.

I went back and forth with this book. I was affected by its emotions – you’d have to be dead not to be. On the other hand, it was not deeply or craftily written by any standards. When Sparks wants to have birds dip into the water, that’s what they do.

All along this blog, I have underlined and written down the unique and great way that authors have captured something – a thought, a scene, an image. Didn’t underline once in this one.

Perhaps the most divisive for my little head is that Sparks goes for the absolutely most dramatic way of saying or posing anything. So on almost every page, I am a little moved and a lot wanting to yell “enough already!”

But I am different and the whole world is different from when this story took flight. I would have to say that I don’t think this book fly now. Very sudsy, very dramatic, put a little cloying in there and I don’t think it would fly. Or at the very least, it would fly to far fewer people than at the time it came out.

I have no doubt that Sparks felt this with all his heart and soul. This story is clearly his ideal. But if I met him, I think that, after shutting this book, I would have to slap him and say “snap out of it!”

I finished the last 100 pages of this in one sitting, partly

because I wanted to see what happened but for the last 50 of those pages, I just didn’t want to read it for one more day.

Am I glad I read this? It’s funny. There were books in here that I liked less but was still glad I read. This book I liked a bit more than some of those but I would just as soon not have read it or visited it again.