Poudelivre

I just finished reading Nicholas Sparks famous novel The Notebook today. I've seen the movie a few times and I really wanted to read the book to get another perspective on the story. I remember a friend of mine telling me after she read the book, that she was very disappointed since the book and the movie didn't really match. I can see now what she was talking about, because the book and the movie are not at all similar. It’s still about Noah and Allie and their love that overcome both families, engagements, a war and a horrible disease, but that’s where the similarities end. In the movie, you get to follow Noah and Allie during the summer when the meet each other for the first time. You can see what they do, the places they visit and you get to know the two of them when they’re in love at a young age. Later in the movie you see them again, now older though, and still in love even though they’ve spent seven years apart. In the book, however, the writer talks about Noah and Allies past (the summer they fell in love) for only two pages and the biggest part of the book is spent following them when they meet together again after fourteen years apart. As you can see, there are some big adjustments and some minor ones as well (like Allies last name is different in the movie, the time they spent apart is longer in the book and so on). A few of you probably knows that I really hate when things are changed when a book is adapted to a movie. Especially details that are so easy to just keep as they are, sometimes there’s just no point in changing them and for some reason it still happened. However, it didn’t really bother me this time. Maybe because the differences where so big, that sometimes it didn’t even feel like the same story.

The book in itself though, is a wonderful thing to read. The story is still great, even if it doesn’t match the movie, which did take me of guard for a little while in the beginning. It’s a fantastic spin on a beautiful love story where the love in itself could survive everything and on some level even got me believing in soul mates and that true love exist. There were moments when I felt almost like the words in front of me where dancing over the pages, such a weird thing, but Sparks way to write felt like a dance, like waves that softly moves together, one sentence to another. In the book, Noah, the main male character, loves poetry and read it a lot. I believe Sparks reads poetry himself, because the book and the way he wrote it, felt like a novel of poetry. It may sound weird, but it was so soft, so easy, so light and moving. His writing really touched me and while reading I realized that it doesn’t matter if the book and the movie isn’t the same, because the book has something that movie doesn’t have. And that’s Sparks wonderful writing skills.

I’m not really a fan of love stories; you might have noticed that because I don’t tend to read a book where the main subject is love. Of course, it creeps up in every book in some way or another, but this, I believe, is the first real love novel I ever read. And it didn’t disappoint me. I probably won’t keep reading love stories, because I often find them shallow, a story between a woman and a man that meets, fall in love, break up because of some problem down the road and then get together again in the end, well I just feel that I’ve seen that story so many times now that I don’t find it interesting anymore. But The Notebook is something else, since their love has to crush so many obstacles throughout the pages that it never really gets boring. And I don’t think it well, even if I read this book a hundred times over again. It’s Sparks wonderful writing that turns the book from something that could be just boring and simple, to something fantastic, beautiful, something that I’ve never seen before.