"Do you ever wonder why things have to turn out the way they do?"
— Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember.
There are some stories in life that make you stop and think about its unpredictabilities. And for me, this was one of those stories.
Even though, A Walk to Remember isn't a story filled with philosophical meanings and symbolic gestures, it's a story that paints out human emotions in the most simple way, which makes it stand out for me from the rest of the novels I came across when I was young.
Most people who know Nicolas Sparks know he is a romance writer. And this book is undoubtedly about romance. But the tragedy woven into the story, now that makes it something much, much more. The clear knowledge of what the future holds, and accepting it nonetheless, with open arms and open heart, that’s what A Walk to Remember is about.
Even if the characters and the story itself are cliched, (Bad boy falls for good girl, nothing really new.) what I really liked about the novel is how it was told from the point of view of a man. It told the story of how he fell in love, and how he, despite everything, held on to that love until the very end.
"I hadn't done any of
the things that I normally did with girls,
yet somehow I'd fallen in love."
As I was just a teen who entered high school back when I came across this novel, it did manage to leave more or less of a mark on me. See, I am a hopeless romantic. And this tragedy induced novel had given me the exact dose of romance and yearning all at once, making me wistful about the kind of love that Jamie and Langdon had, that lived on even after Jamie died.
I think that was the thing that made me love this novel as much as I did. The idea of loving someone so much, that even after death, they lived on within you, is really something else. And it's how Langdon had loved Jamie in the novel.
He loved her through the highs and he loved her through the lows. Even when he knew there was no future in the far distant waiting for them, even when he knew the moments they had left were few and fickle, that she was someone who never would make it past her twenties, he still got down on his knees to ask her to spend her life with him, even if the life she could offer him was very, very was short.
"Without suffering,
there'd be no compassion."
This is a quote I believe in. Without sorrow, we wouldn't know what joy is. They are woven together like scraps of delicate lace. And love, like anything beautiful, comes with both.
For me, it's hard to write about a favourite novel. I lose track and go on and on about things that hardly matter. But that's how I pick out my favourites. As a person who focuses more on the emotions than the story a novel represents, I don't think I am the right person to judge if a book is worthy to be read or not.
It's the pointless small things that make me love a novel. And A Walk to Remember, like many other novels I adore, is filled with many pointless small things. It's the book that marks the start of my official addiction towards English Literature. I'll hold it close to my heart forever.
I'll end this with one of my favourite quotes from the novel;