The Time Traveler's WifeAudrey NiffeneggerHarvest Books: 2003546 pp. $14.00ISBN: 015602943X
Introduction:
Audrey Niffenegger published her first traditional novel in 2003. Her book, The Time Traveler's Wife, has earned wide acclaim: it's a New York Times bestseller, one of People's top ten books of 2003, and a book club pick on the Today Show.
Her book is quite an accomplishment for a person who has, until now, produced visual novels that would run a mere ten copies. Niffenegger is a professor at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts' MFA program. She teaches for the Interdisciplinary Arts department, mostly focusing on classes dealing with making books from scrap.
There have been some interesting side stories to the novel's success: Niffenegger dyed her hair red (the same as her female lead's) in celebration of her novel's completion, and famous couple Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt have reportedly optioned film rights--though it's yet to be seen if the pair will play the destined couple in Niffenegger's book.
The Story Without Spoilers:
Characters
Henry DeTamble is the time traveler. We know him at many phases of his life, though not necessarily chronologically. Henry suffers from a disorder that causes him to travel through time involuntarily.
Clare Abshire is the wife. We know her through many phases of her life and most of the time we are introduced to her chronologically: as child, student, artist, and wife.
Plot Information:
The Time Traveler's Wife is set in Chicago over a period of many years with a smattering of punk and art references. We meet the characters through an alternating first-person narration of the book. Clare always knew that she'd be with Henry; she met the adult Henry while she was only a child. Henry didn't meet Clare until he was older. She went to his library looking for a librarian, when someone suggested she speak with him. When she realized the librarian she was speaking to was the Henry she knew as a child she excitedly greeted him, leaving him to wonder how he knew the young woman.
There are interesting dynamics created by the unusual plot. For example, when Clare first meets Henry he had knowledge of their future life but she knew nothing of it. However, when Clare and Henry meet in real time she knows about his future even though he hasn't lived that phase of his life yet. There are also many conflicts to resolve along the way: dating, meeting friends, or visiting family is always a bit suspenseful. Once married, the pair is unsure if they will be able to have children or not. They also try to resolve how Henry came to be afflicted with this disorder. While trying to discover the root cause they work with doctors to see if there is a cure. The biggest mystery for the reader is to see if Henry will be able to live a normal life or if something horrible happens to him while he is traveling through time.
Analysis of the work:
This is an interesting work in many ways. From a literary perspective, Niffenegger was able to use many interesting devices due to the unique nature of her story. Because of Henry's frequent time traveling, the story is not told in chronological order. This foreshadowing is natural, so the audience learns bits about the lives of the characters from Henry's time travel. The reader learns facts before Clare in some cases and before Henry in others. It allows the reader to be a detective and piece together information that would not be available if the story was told strictly from a real time-chronological order.
The shared first-person narrative allows the reader to get to know both Clare and Henry in a way that a single first-person narrative or a third-person narrative could not accomplish. This narrative also gives the reader a better understanding of the relationship between the pair. This book is a love story, and quite romantic, but it is also much more realistic because the reader does see the relationship from both party's perspectives. Clare does like to be alone sometimes and Henry can be irritating and rude, but it's okay because the characters seem entirely realistic, and real people do have traits that aren't perfect.
The science behind the story is nearly impossible to accept, but the story is so compelling that once the reader accepts the premise the storytelling truly carries the novel. Niffenegger's choice of location also tempers the far-fetched science. Having lived in Chicago, she has a thorough understanding of the environment. She places this very fanciful story in a very concrete place. It allows the reader to have something real to ground the story in.
Finally, Niffenegger also makes philosophy interesting to the average reader. Her story is a metaphor dealing with metaphysical issues of identity, time, fate, and destiny. Is one really the same person over completely different periods of time? Does time run in only one direction? Is there such a thing as predestination or free will? This book will be interesting to those who like these kinds of questions as well as those who just want to read a good story.
Showing posts with label Time Traveller's Wife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Time Traveller's Wife. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
Guardian Review
Audrey Niffenegger throws you into a pretty perplexing scenario at the start of The Time Traveler's Wife. Here are a woman and a man meeting in a Chicago library, but while Clare clearly knows Henry and has done for ages, Henry doesn't have a clue who she is. This, we gradually understand, is because he has been travelling from his future to her past, and in that past they fell in love, so he hasn't yet met her in his own present. Somehow, that tangled mess of tenses sorts out on the page into a scene that is entirely comprehensible and rather charming.
Niffenegger goes on to exploit the possibilities of her fantasy scenario with immense skill: no wonder this first novel has spent weeks on the bestseller lists in the US. Her version of time travel lends itself to neat comedy - it is an uncontrollable condition, which means Henry can find himself sucked out of the present and thrown naked into another time and place at any moment.
For instance, when Clare and Henry finally get married, with all their family and friends in attendance, he is maddeningly whisked away just before the ceremony. But luckily, through one of the sweet coincidences that is a feature of Niffenegger's world, an older Henry falls through the years to take his place, and only the most observant of guests wonders about his suddenly grizzled appearance.
Even at such a carefully composed moment of comedy, Niffenegger keeps the pitch tuned not just to the mechanics of her magical world, but also to the emotions of the couple. This is what saves this novel from being just a childish joke: her ability to mesh the japes with a careful grounding in the dynamics of character and relationship. Take away the time travel, and you have a writer reminiscent of Anne Tyler and Carol Shields, who captures the rhythms of intimacy, who burrows into the particularities of family life. Because she builds this scaffolding of domesticity, what you remember is the realism as well as the fantasy, and through much of the book the time travel works to enhance the reality rather than take over from it.
When Clare first makes love with Henry she is 18, but he has travelled back in time, and in his present he is 41, has been married to her for years, and is finding their relationship going through a bad patch. After they make love, he is pulled back into his present with the thirtysomething Clare, who is waiting for him crossly: "Henry's been gone for almost 24 hours now, and as usual I'm torn between thinking obsessively about when and where he might be and being pissed at him for not being here... I hear Henry whistling as he comes up the path through the garden, into the studio. He stomps the snow off his boots and shrugs off his coat. He's looking marvellous, really happy. My heart is racing and I take a wild guess: 'May 24, 1989?' 'Yes, oh yes,' Henry scoops me up, and swings me around. Now I'm laughing; we're both laughing."
This scene epitomises the best thing about this book, which is the way Niffenegger uses time travel as a way of expressing the sense of slippage that you get in any relationship - that you could be living through a slightly different love story from the one your partner is experiencing.
And she certainly weaves her plot well. This is one of those books that makes you want to eat it up from start to finish, eager to see how the twisted curves of time will be straightened out. But despite the way that I felt sucked through the novel, the book's limitations eventually begin to grate.
Although at first you might think Niffenegger wanted to disturb the quiet tone of American domestic life with her madcap scenarios, gradually you realise this is a wholly reassuring narrative.
Henry may sometimes find himself at war with the laws of space and time, but at heart he has a "fanatical dedication to living like a normal person". The triumph of the book is the triumph of normality, of setting up a decent family life even if you are constantly dissappearing from it, of being loyal to somebody with what Niffenegger finally explains as a genetic dysfunction - chrono-displacement, as she calls it.
Rather like Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, in which a girl looks down from heaven after her death and even manages to intervene in the lives of those left behind, The Time Traveler's Wife sets up a very benign kind of magic.
Although his time travelling often exposes Henry to danger and embarrassment, it also serves to smooth out the rawness of lived experience. Because Henry can visit the future, he can not only buy a winning lottery ticket if necessary, he can also see the house he and Clare will live in, and even be sure they will be married and have a child.
That certainty about the future gives both of them a quasi-religious sense that their lives are already mapped out, and the time of their deaths already written. In a couple of particularly sentimental scenes, Henry manages to visit Clare and his daughter after his own death, and in those moments there is the evanescent comfort of a vague spirituality. By the time Niffenegger begins to tune up the violins for the swoony sweet ending you knew was on the cards, the magic has taken over from the realism, to the cost of the book's potential impact.
· Natasha Walter's The New Feminism is published by Virago14.12.2003: Interview: Audrey Niffenegger
Niffenegger goes on to exploit the possibilities of her fantasy scenario with immense skill: no wonder this first novel has spent weeks on the bestseller lists in the US. Her version of time travel lends itself to neat comedy - it is an uncontrollable condition, which means Henry can find himself sucked out of the present and thrown naked into another time and place at any moment.
For instance, when Clare and Henry finally get married, with all their family and friends in attendance, he is maddeningly whisked away just before the ceremony. But luckily, through one of the sweet coincidences that is a feature of Niffenegger's world, an older Henry falls through the years to take his place, and only the most observant of guests wonders about his suddenly grizzled appearance.
Even at such a carefully composed moment of comedy, Niffenegger keeps the pitch tuned not just to the mechanics of her magical world, but also to the emotions of the couple. This is what saves this novel from being just a childish joke: her ability to mesh the japes with a careful grounding in the dynamics of character and relationship. Take away the time travel, and you have a writer reminiscent of Anne Tyler and Carol Shields, who captures the rhythms of intimacy, who burrows into the particularities of family life. Because she builds this scaffolding of domesticity, what you remember is the realism as well as the fantasy, and through much of the book the time travel works to enhance the reality rather than take over from it.
When Clare first makes love with Henry she is 18, but he has travelled back in time, and in his present he is 41, has been married to her for years, and is finding their relationship going through a bad patch. After they make love, he is pulled back into his present with the thirtysomething Clare, who is waiting for him crossly: "Henry's been gone for almost 24 hours now, and as usual I'm torn between thinking obsessively about when and where he might be and being pissed at him for not being here... I hear Henry whistling as he comes up the path through the garden, into the studio. He stomps the snow off his boots and shrugs off his coat. He's looking marvellous, really happy. My heart is racing and I take a wild guess: 'May 24, 1989?' 'Yes, oh yes,' Henry scoops me up, and swings me around. Now I'm laughing; we're both laughing."
This scene epitomises the best thing about this book, which is the way Niffenegger uses time travel as a way of expressing the sense of slippage that you get in any relationship - that you could be living through a slightly different love story from the one your partner is experiencing.
And she certainly weaves her plot well. This is one of those books that makes you want to eat it up from start to finish, eager to see how the twisted curves of time will be straightened out. But despite the way that I felt sucked through the novel, the book's limitations eventually begin to grate.
Although at first you might think Niffenegger wanted to disturb the quiet tone of American domestic life with her madcap scenarios, gradually you realise this is a wholly reassuring narrative.
Henry may sometimes find himself at war with the laws of space and time, but at heart he has a "fanatical dedication to living like a normal person". The triumph of the book is the triumph of normality, of setting up a decent family life even if you are constantly dissappearing from it, of being loyal to somebody with what Niffenegger finally explains as a genetic dysfunction - chrono-displacement, as she calls it.
Rather like Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, in which a girl looks down from heaven after her death and even manages to intervene in the lives of those left behind, The Time Traveler's Wife sets up a very benign kind of magic.
Although his time travelling often exposes Henry to danger and embarrassment, it also serves to smooth out the rawness of lived experience. Because Henry can visit the future, he can not only buy a winning lottery ticket if necessary, he can also see the house he and Clare will live in, and even be sure they will be married and have a child.
That certainty about the future gives both of them a quasi-religious sense that their lives are already mapped out, and the time of their deaths already written. In a couple of particularly sentimental scenes, Henry manages to visit Clare and his daughter after his own death, and in those moments there is the evanescent comfort of a vague spirituality. By the time Niffenegger begins to tune up the violins for the swoony sweet ending you knew was on the cards, the magic has taken over from the realism, to the cost of the book's potential impact.
· Natasha Walter's The New Feminism is published by Virago14.12.2003: Interview: Audrey Niffenegger
Our next read........in April 2008
Our next book choice is "The Time Traveller's Wife" which will be introduced by Vernon Goddard.
A variety of reviews will be posted about this book in the next few weeks.
A variety of reviews will be posted about this book in the next few weeks.
The Time Traveller's Wife ~ Not so complimentary review
84 of 116 people found the following review helpful:
HOW CAN ANYONE LIKE THIS PRETENTIOUS SELF-SATISFIED DRIVEL?
, January 13, 2004
By
Marc A. Weiner (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Time Traveler's Wife (Today Show Book Club #15) (Hardcover)
Why is this book so popular? Is it the plot-premise of a romantic relationship between a man who uncontrollably travels through time-leaving and returning to the present without warning-and the more chronologically anchored woman who loves him, or is it perhaps something else entirely? I was lulled into buying this book by the many enthusiastic reviews it has received, but found it to be not only a waste of time, but annoying as well. This must be one of the most pretentious novels I've ever read. All of the characters act and sound like refugees from an episode of Friends or Seinfeld, a group of oh-so-cool, oh-so-well-educated, exquisitely cultured, insouciant and--wow, really neat!--yuppies in their mid-thirties who all speak with the same voice, quote an endless string of Rilke poems, make references to Foucault and Heidegger, name-drop and cite passages from their favorite belletristic authors, listen to everything under the sun from the trendiest, coolest punk music to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, eat in the newest ethnic restaurants (Thai seems to be a special favorite), and exhibit inexhaustible sexual energy while igniting overwhelming desire in all those around them. The novel reads like a compilation of cultural clichés, from the title character's experiences while traveling through time (like the human in the first Terminator movie, he arrives nauseous, naked, and exhibits sprinter-like athleticism), to countless other scenes in each of which the author has him cite some literary quote obviously intended to make him appear exquisitely educated (one particularly egregious examples is one scene in which he quotes--get ready to be impressed-Hamlet's "Had I but world enough and time.").
Though certainly unintended, the book strikes one as a satirical postmodernist version of Love Story, albeit with a twist: this time it's the girl whose family is incredibly wealthy (of course they live in a Frank Lloyd Wright-like mansion), while the guy's parents are less well-to-do, but also uniquely impressive: the author's imagination would not allow her main character's deceased mother to be just any old Hausfrau-no, she had to be a young, beautiful, Metropolitan Opera diva, and his bereaved father not just some normal, nine-to-five type of guy, but no less than the principal violinist of the New York Philharmonic. Everyone in this group of shallow, narcissistic intellectual wannabes speaks with the same voice and thinks with the same, impoverished, cliché-ridden imagination, and each thereby emerges as little more than a two-dimensional player in a larger, stereotypical ensemble design (and hence, again, as a fictional distant cousin of the casts of TV sit-coms); we have the rugged, iconoclastic young man (a heart-throb and heart-breaker of countless unfortunate women-sound like Ted Danson to anyone?), the middle-class princess (an object of desire for all who see her, men and women alike-perhaps they can cast Jennifer Aniston in the role if this is ever made into a movie), their male best friend who, though married, also lusts after Clare, his flip and savvy wife, their gay acquaintance who, of course, is dying of AIDS (Robert Downey, Jr., could play this guy), etc. etc.
While the manifest content of this self-satisfied text appears to descend from the liberalism of the late 1960s, its implied conservative ideology is located in the traditional image of the nuclear family, the sanctity of which is repeated over and over again in the book and is central to such other (and in this respect similar, though cinematic) examples of popular culture of the last twenty years as Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, Fatal Attraction, and virtually all of Spielberg's most popular films. Perhaps that is the key to this shallow novel's success: It manages to appeal to the pseudo-intellectual tastes of an aging and despairing generation of liberals even as it reinforces the foundations of a society that no longer dares hope for political change, and instead has retreated into the more modest sphere of domestic bliss. I don't know what is scarier: the fact that this book is so completely lacking in any ironic awareness of its own pretentious make-up, that it has been received with such praise, or that, as the publishers proudly inform us, this is the author's first novel. Perhaps it's a good thing that time-travel remains an element of fiction.
HOW CAN ANYONE LIKE THIS PRETENTIOUS SELF-SATISFIED DRIVEL?
, January 13, 2004
By
Marc A. Weiner (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Time Traveler's Wife (Today Show Book Club #15) (Hardcover)
Why is this book so popular? Is it the plot-premise of a romantic relationship between a man who uncontrollably travels through time-leaving and returning to the present without warning-and the more chronologically anchored woman who loves him, or is it perhaps something else entirely? I was lulled into buying this book by the many enthusiastic reviews it has received, but found it to be not only a waste of time, but annoying as well. This must be one of the most pretentious novels I've ever read. All of the characters act and sound like refugees from an episode of Friends or Seinfeld, a group of oh-so-cool, oh-so-well-educated, exquisitely cultured, insouciant and--wow, really neat!--yuppies in their mid-thirties who all speak with the same voice, quote an endless string of Rilke poems, make references to Foucault and Heidegger, name-drop and cite passages from their favorite belletristic authors, listen to everything under the sun from the trendiest, coolest punk music to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, eat in the newest ethnic restaurants (Thai seems to be a special favorite), and exhibit inexhaustible sexual energy while igniting overwhelming desire in all those around them. The novel reads like a compilation of cultural clichés, from the title character's experiences while traveling through time (like the human in the first Terminator movie, he arrives nauseous, naked, and exhibits sprinter-like athleticism), to countless other scenes in each of which the author has him cite some literary quote obviously intended to make him appear exquisitely educated (one particularly egregious examples is one scene in which he quotes--get ready to be impressed-Hamlet's "Had I but world enough and time.").
Though certainly unintended, the book strikes one as a satirical postmodernist version of Love Story, albeit with a twist: this time it's the girl whose family is incredibly wealthy (of course they live in a Frank Lloyd Wright-like mansion), while the guy's parents are less well-to-do, but also uniquely impressive: the author's imagination would not allow her main character's deceased mother to be just any old Hausfrau-no, she had to be a young, beautiful, Metropolitan Opera diva, and his bereaved father not just some normal, nine-to-five type of guy, but no less than the principal violinist of the New York Philharmonic. Everyone in this group of shallow, narcissistic intellectual wannabes speaks with the same voice and thinks with the same, impoverished, cliché-ridden imagination, and each thereby emerges as little more than a two-dimensional player in a larger, stereotypical ensemble design (and hence, again, as a fictional distant cousin of the casts of TV sit-coms); we have the rugged, iconoclastic young man (a heart-throb and heart-breaker of countless unfortunate women-sound like Ted Danson to anyone?), the middle-class princess (an object of desire for all who see her, men and women alike-perhaps they can cast Jennifer Aniston in the role if this is ever made into a movie), their male best friend who, though married, also lusts after Clare, his flip and savvy wife, their gay acquaintance who, of course, is dying of AIDS (Robert Downey, Jr., could play this guy), etc. etc.
While the manifest content of this self-satisfied text appears to descend from the liberalism of the late 1960s, its implied conservative ideology is located in the traditional image of the nuclear family, the sanctity of which is repeated over and over again in the book and is central to such other (and in this respect similar, though cinematic) examples of popular culture of the last twenty years as Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, Fatal Attraction, and virtually all of Spielberg's most popular films. Perhaps that is the key to this shallow novel's success: It manages to appeal to the pseudo-intellectual tastes of an aging and despairing generation of liberals even as it reinforces the foundations of a society that no longer dares hope for political change, and instead has retreated into the more modest sphere of domestic bliss. I don't know what is scarier: the fact that this book is so completely lacking in any ironic awareness of its own pretentious make-up, that it has been received with such praise, or that, as the publishers proudly inform us, this is the author's first novel. Perhaps it's a good thing that time-travel remains an element of fiction.
The Time Traveller's Wife ~ A favourable review
601 of 680 people found the following review helpful:
Powerful, well-written, original, September 4, 2003
By
Diana
"The Time Traveler's Wife" is one of the most interesting, powerful books I've read in a long time. Audrey Niffenegger did a beautiful job taking some of the most complex ideas - time travel, marriage, love, children, friends, literary and artistic allusions, religion, death, drugs, childhood, growing, loss, and what it means to be human - and weaving them together poetically and with amazing clarity. Her characters are wonderful, "real" people with strengths and flaws, and I really grew to adore them. Despite skipping around time at the same rate as Henry, the time traveler, the events are sequenced in such a way that you still witness each character's growth as a person, as well as discover many surprises along the way. Clare and Henry's story is one of the best love stories I've read in a very long time. This book also echoes important modern-day questions about the appropriateness of gene therapy, and what it means to be a human being. I highly and enthusiastically recommend this book.
Powerful, well-written, original, September 4, 2003
By
Diana
"The Time Traveler's Wife" is one of the most interesting, powerful books I've read in a long time. Audrey Niffenegger did a beautiful job taking some of the most complex ideas - time travel, marriage, love, children, friends, literary and artistic allusions, religion, death, drugs, childhood, growing, loss, and what it means to be human - and weaving them together poetically and with amazing clarity. Her characters are wonderful, "real" people with strengths and flaws, and I really grew to adore them. Despite skipping around time at the same rate as Henry, the time traveler, the events are sequenced in such a way that you still witness each character's growth as a person, as well as discover many surprises along the way. Clare and Henry's story is one of the best love stories I've read in a very long time. This book also echoes important modern-day questions about the appropriateness of gene therapy, and what it means to be a human being. I highly and enthusiastically recommend this book.
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