Bibliofreakblog

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

For the last 48 hours or so, I’ve put most of my life on hold, functioning only perfunctorily, in order to read this book.  There’s several things that I liked about right off the bat: It takes place in West Michigan and Chicago, the characters are punk rock intelligentsia, and the narrative in prickled with musical and literary references.  But most of all, it’s a love story that I was compellingly drawn to, and able to relate.

I’ve never time traveled.  And neither has my husband, Jason, as far as I am aware.  In fact, I don’t know anybody who has time traveled, and therefore cannot, and do not expect anyone, to relate to it on that level.  Just to make that clear.

But I did meet my husband when I was fourteen.  There’s that literary criticism theory that goes that interpretation is all about the reader and blah blah blah, and I’m not usually a big proponent of that school, or really any one school, come to think of it, but I felt that my own relationship was wrapped up with the characters’.

Plus, Jason is out of town and I’m here by myself and missing him.  Also why I could blow off other things and just read for hours on end.  It’s about 550 pages give or take, so not super thick, but I’m not that fast of a reader, for all of the reading I do.

The story is about Clare and Henry.  They are 20 and 28, respectively, when they first meet.  Er, well, when Henry first meets Clare.  When Clare first meets Henry, she is six and he is in his thirties.  Henry is a time traveler.  After he marries Clare a few years after his meeting her, he continually goes back in time and visits her throughout her childhood and adolescence.  These are new experiences for him, but old ones for Clare.

So, here’s a quick story about me and Jason.  We met in 8th grade, went out til the middle of 9th grade (a very long time when you are 14), broke up, “hated” each other, and at a high school of 5,000, managed to make the same friends.  We got back together homecoming of our senior year, stayed together though we went to separate colleges about 100 miles apart, and got married after graduation.  That was almost 4 years ago.  

Why am I boring you with my personal life?  Because I get Clare and Henry.  I get knowing someone and being shaped by them and shaping them.  I was a different person about every year through high school, and probably college, and am probably a different person now than when we got married.  And through it all, to some degree, I have been with Jason.  And he’s done the same.  He’s not the same person that I stopped dead in my tracks upon first seeing, and yet I still love that person, too.  We’re two halves of something bigger.

And that’s how Henry and Clare are.  They are wound together in an inextricable way.  They’re the same person.

Would Jason see the same things I did when he comes back from his trip and I force him to read this book?  I don’t know.  Because it’s not just a love story.  It’s also an adventure, and a mystery, with clues falling in from various years, and various ages of the characters.

Niffenegger never bogs the story down with theories of time travel, or really tries to unravel that mystery at all.  As the far the characters know, it is a genetic disorder, and that’s all we know.  At various points in their lives, they believe in determinism and chaos and everything in between.  It’s refreshing to have a sci fi story that doesn’t have to spell out the answers but just gets on with the story.

So, there’s a movie coming out this year, and I’m pysched, but I wonder how they’ll pull it off, because it’s told from both Clare and Henry’s perspective from different parts of their lives.  So, we’ll see.  

And sorry, readers, for regaling you with the history of my marriage or whatever.  I just literally finished the book and was so excited to share!

If you like this book/author, you might like:

The Thorn Birds (F) by Colleen McCullough
Slaughterhouse-Five (F) by Kurt Vonnegut
Timequake (F) by Kurt Vonnegut
Kindred (F) by Octavia E. Butler
Rant (F) by Chuck Palahniuk
Flight (F) by Sherman Alexie 
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (NF) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain 
Middlesex (F) by Jeffrey Eugenides  
Outlander (F) by Diana Gabaldon
About Time: 12 Short Stories (F) by Jack Finney 
Cat’s Eye (F) by Margaret Atwood 
The Good Fairies of New York (F) by Martin Millar 

Other works by Audrey Niffenegger:

The Adventuress (F)
The Three Incestuous Sisters (F)