One Day

Title      : One Day

Writer  : David Nicholls

Year     : 2009 (first published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton)

Language          : English

Didn’t realize at first that this novel had come out as a movie. Even as I saw the ‘romantic’ book cover, a man and a woman locked in an intimate embrace and kissing. A very light sweet kissing, not the passionate or lewder one. Once I got a look on the cover, I decided that I had to buy and read it.

The ‘love story’ begins with a not-lovely night of two just-graduated people, Emma and Dexter. They’ve known each other all along at University, but just start to get along at the graduation night. Yes, imagine that. Emma is so in love with Dexter, having had a crush on him the since the days of her study at University; but Dexter is a promiscuous kind of man, if I may say, and doesn’t see her until that graduation night. So, they spend the night together. No, they do not do anything but talking, hugging, and kissing. Until they separate to each other’s way at the end.

The story continues at the exact date of the next year (the same date always appears in every year along the book) when Dexter goes on his traveling around the world and Emma sticks around in England with despair, hopeless life, no self-confidence, and depressing one-way love. After that, the next first chapters of the book will drag you through the pace in which Emma is so desperate about her life and her love to Dexter, while Dexter is taking his time enjoying life and having fun, with no concern whatsoever about Emma’s feelings. He only knows that he likes Emma too, and considers her as his friend. That’s what they are, Em and Dex, Dex and Em, for years.

Until the pace is increasing where Emma can no longer ‘wait for’ Dexter and move on having a relationship with another guy, someone who really loves her. But as her relationship goes on, she realizes that she cannot love him back and still think of Dexter. Unfortunately, her friendship with Dexter is on the way to devastation, so she finds herself having an affair with some other man.

The next pace finds Dexter falling in love with a woman, and then marry her. Unfortunately, again, that happens when his friendship with Emma recovers. So, when his marriage is not on the right track, he can always turn to Emma, who is taking Dexter’s marriage ‘quite’ seriously that she finds herself reluctant to accompany Dexter in his loneliness.

The pace then moves on to Dexter’s divorce (caused by his own old flat-mate), his sudden lack of self-confidence, his sudden desperation, and a time when he and Emma start their ‘love relationship’ in Paris. They’re finally married, but that’s not quite successful either.

The interesting thing about this book is not only the always-same date of every year of each chapter, but also the pace of the story, the pace of the character development in each chapter, the pace of the friendship and most importantly, the pace of those two people’s lives. How can you hang out with the same person for nearly twenty years and not realize, or not want to realize perhaps, that that one is the one for you for all this time? When I read Dexter’s sadness and regrets at the end of the story it felt like I wanna shout out to him: “It’s your own faults, dude!”.

Well, the story is well-told, but sometimes I found it not so emotional. I don’t know why. This is the very first time I read a British love story/romance novel, and I still don’t know how them British authors create a love story formula. It just didn’t make me cry when it’s supposed to make me ‘cry’.

However, One Day by David Nicholls is a very good story. I really like it. That lack of emotion (at least for me) doesn’t really matter. It’s very great of Nicholls to catch people’s life paces and character development and then cram them into twenty years of twenty three chapters. For those of you who are not used to British-English and how the British authors form their jokes, you might not like it. It depends on your own taste.

Rating: 3.5

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