The Time Traveler's Wife

Rating:
Summary: Original but sometimes confusing
Review: This is a good book, but sometimes it reads more like a magic act than an actual book. Clare and Henry are the couple that the book follows. They are destined to be each other's great love, but they cannot always be together because Henry is jostled back and forth in time.

Therefore, they meet up at different points in time. The difference in their ages does not even remain stable. Sometimes Henry is 45 and Clare is 28; other times Clare is 7 and Henry is 36; sometimes, though not often, Clare is older than Henry.

In this way, the book is startling and original. Henry is briefly involved with another woman when he cannot be with Clare, but he does not love the other woman. She shows up eventually to exact her revenge.

I admired the author's ability to execute this striking and original idea, but sometimes I wanted the story to linger in one time frame so it could focus more on the characters and less on the concept.

Rating:
Summary: An Instant Classic!
Review: From time to time, a novel lands in my hands as if it fell from the sky-a happy surprise of literary delights, a book which transports and transfixes me, an original story which creates its own world with what seems like effortless artistry. Audrey Niffenegger's remarkable debut, The Time-Traveler's Wife, is just such a novel.

The Time-Traveler's Wife is an infection that pleasantly invades your system and refuses to let go of the imagination even after you turn the last of its 518 pages and move on to the next book on your shelf. It's a love story concealed inside a suspense novel wrapped in a thin veneer of science fiction. At the center of the story stand two characters, Henry and Clare. I'll let Henry explain their situation:

"I met Clare for the first time in October, 1991. She met me for the first time in September, 1977; she was six, I will be thirty-eight. She's known me all her life. In 1991 I'm just getting to know her."

Henry is a time-traveler who drops in and out of various moments in his life-sometimes back to the past, sometimes forward to the future. Clare leads a chronologically-normal life. The two of them intersect, in "real time," when Clare is 20 and Henry is 28; however, she's known him-a much older-version, that is-since she was a little girl. For years, she's known he was her future husband, so by the time she actually meets the real-time Henry (who's a little befuddled at this strange girl rushing up to him in the Chicago library where he works), Clare practically has their wedding already planned out.

Confused yet? Don't worry, Niffenegger patiently, carefully guides the reader through the tangled narrative.

The story follows the lovers across a timeline shaped like a Mobius strip, alternating between their viewpoints. They do their best to live normal lives, going after the American Dream of steady jobs, witty friends and children of their own. Ultimately, their relationship turns as sweet and tragic as an Emily Dickinson poem.

As you can imagine, The Time-Traveler's Wife has the potential to bend your mind with cosmic philosophies which pretzel-twist logic and reality. It's probably the only novel I've ever read which turns discussions about free will and determinism into page-turning entertainment.

Niffenegger never lets her carefully-designed world get out of control. There are certain "rules" to Henry's travel-for instance, he tries not to tell anyone what will happen to them in the future for fear that he'll return to an altered world; he never travels far outside the time boundaries of his life (in other words, no dinosaurs or medieval knights make appearances in this book); and he revisits events in his life more than once, even if it means watching his mother die a horrible death over and over. He never knows exactly when he'll be taking a trip:

Sometimes it feels as though your attention has wandered for just an instant. Then, with a start, you realize that the book you were holding, the red plain cotton shirt with white buttons, the favorite black jeans and the maroon socks with an almost-hole in the heel, the living room, the about-to-whistle tea kettle in the kitchen: all of these have vanished. You are standing, naked as a jaybird, up to your ankles in ice water in a ditch along an unidentified rural route...You've mislocated yourself again.

Henry eventually seeks help from a doctor who, he hopes, can cure him of his chrono-displacement. The condition seems to be a physical one (no H.G. Wells contraptions or gigawatt-tripping DeLoreans show up in these pages): I think it's a brain thing. I think it's a lot like epilepsy because it tends to happen when I'm stressed, and there are physical cues, like flashing light, that can prompt it. And because things like running, and sex, and meditation tend to help me stay put in the present.
Niffenegger even allows Henry to visit himself in the past and engage himself in conversations and, briefly, a masturbatory sexual experience. The effect is funny and remarkably poignant at the same time:

I ponder my double. He's curled up, hedgehog style, facing away from me, evidently asleep. I envy him. He is me, but I'm not him, yet. He has been through five years of a life that's still mysterious to me, still coiled tightly waiting to spring out and bite. Of course, whatever pleasures are to be had, he's had them; for me they wait like a box of unpoked chocolates.

The Time-Traveler's Wife is like one of those chocolates nestled in brown paper cups-a rare literary confection that melts in your hand, your mouth and your head. Die-hard romantics will be savoring this one for years to come. It's simply a GREAT book! Don't miss it! Another quick Amazon recommendation I loved was The Losers Club: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez, another offbeat, very funny, romantic book.


Rating:
Summary: Enthralling.
Review: I just finished this book last night and still cannot stop thinking about it. It is stunningly beautiful and amazing and sad and real and enlightening. It's a life story. Yes, it is about a man with Chrono Displacement Disorder, a new genetic disease in this alternate world that Niffenegger has created. But that's not the point of this story. It is about the power of love. Of that possibility we ALL want to believe in that love can overcome everything, even fate. I disagree with the reader who said she believed this story had to be written by a man, because of the language used or the fact that Clare sleeps with another man. I think it was a wonderfully real and daring choice of Niffenegger to create those things for Clare's world. We ALL make mistakes. If she'd remained true to him, technically in the time before she even MET Henry in real time (and I won't give away the most shocking part of this book by saying anything else), it would have made her too perfect. And therefore, very hard to sympathize with. And I also disagree about the ending. The ending made me love this book. I was...starting to almost be mad at it until that ending. I didn't like the implications of it, feeling like fate is inevitable, that we create everything. That no matter what, your path is laid out before you and you can do nothing. But their love overcame everything, even death and brought him to her when it would otherwise be impossible.

There were points of the book I would have LOVED to have been explored more. Things I connected the dots to that I wished had been explored more. Times when he randomly re-appeared - specifically the two times he appeared injured, once at Clare's door bleeding from the head and the other time in their kitchen when he fell on the glassware. I believed (perhaps wrongly) this was the same Henry, time travelling perhaps more than once? Or maybe they were different times when he was injured. I wanted to know what happened to him. Or to see him come back into real time like that, to know what followed. But at the same time, the wondering is what makes it real.

I haven't cried this much reading a book in a long time. But it wasn't like the book was contrived to make its audience cry. Like some movies, you can just tell watching the trailer that they are set up stragetically to get their audience to cry. Which is fine and has its place. But perhaps that was what was so wonderful about this book. It was real. And unfair, like life. And yet incredible.

And the character work. I really KNEW Clare and Henry. I understood their world. Their passions, their professions, their loves...the events of their lives that shaped who they were and the choices they've made. These were three-dimensional people, flesh and blood. You fall in love with them. And that is why this novel is so compelling.

I...highly recommend this book.