Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Kernel's Library: The Love That Knows No Memories

The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks Book 00057: The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

Title:
- The Notebook

First Publication:
- 1 October 1996 by Warner Books


Trivia:
- This is Nicholas Sparks' very first published novel, and the third written after The Passing and The Royal Murders, which were never published.
- The novel was written over a period of six months in 1994 and literary agent Willa U. Fukudome discovered Sparks after picking the book out of her agency's slush pile. Park liked it and offered to represent him. In October 1995, Park secured a $1 million advance for it from Time Warner Book Group, and the novel was published in October 1996.
- Nicholas has four kids, all of whom share names with Sparks' characters.


Award:
- New York Times bestseller (Fiction, 1996)



I bought The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks because a friend of mine told me so. She wanted me to buy the book simply because she was delighted of its movie adaptation released in 2004. I wanted to read it also, so I decided to buy it without much hesitation. But after all these years I was not able to read it for many other books were in line on my priority list -- so until now the book is still unknown to me. I was able to read a few chapters as a taster but I haven't really finished it. I liked the parts where I'd read it by far, but for some reasons I don't know what I can't stomach to continue... Was it because the book's a love story? I am not sure...



The Story:

A man with a faded, well-worn notebook open in his lap. A woman experiencing a morning ritual she doesn't understand. Until he begins to read to her. The Notebook is an achingly tender story about the enduring power of love, a story of miracles that will stay with you forever.

Set amid the austere beauty of coastal North Carolina in 1946, The Notebook begins with the story of Noah Calhoun, a rural Southerner returned home from World War II. Noah, thirty-one, is restoring a plantation home to its former glory, and he is haunted by images of the beautiful girl he met fourteen years earlier, a girl he loved like no other. Unable to find her, yet unwilling to forget the summer they spent together, Noah is content to live with only memories...until she unexpectedly returns to his town to see him once again.

Allie Nelson, twenty-nine, is now engaged to another man, but realizes that the original passion she felt for Noah has not dimmed with the passage of time. Still, the obstacles that once ended their previous relationship remain, and the gulf between their worlds is too vast to ignore. With her impending marriage only weeks away, Allie is forced to confront her hopes and dreams for the future, a future that only she can shape.

Like a puzzle within a puzzle, the story of Noah and Allie is just the beginning. As it unfolds, their tale miraculously becomes something different, with much higher stakes. The result is a deeply moving portrait of love itself, the tender moments and the fundamental changes that affect us all. Shining with a beauty that is rarely found in current literature, The Notebook establishes Nicholas Sparks as a classic storyteller with a unique insight into the only emotion that really matters.

"I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."

And so begins one of the most poignant and compelling love stories you will ever read... The Notebook.

To be read...

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