Ginger, on The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

A beautiful cover to be sure.

Title: The Time Traveler's Wife
Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Published: 2003
Format: Paperback
                              Grade: A 

Amazon Description: 
A dazzling novel in the most nontraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.

My Review: 
Never before have I had such a personal love/hate relationship with an author. Niffenegger is

Audrey Niffenegger, author

brilliant, and I have great respect for her as a writer. So far I have read two of her works - The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry (might be reviewed at a later date) - both of which are written superbly. Her style is mesmerizing - beautiful and harsh all at once with no apologies.

Her writing itself is so extremely realistic - She crafts characters so incredibly human in their faults and merits that they feel like people you could know in real life. Not necessarily someone you would be close to, like a friend, but but someone you know in passing and only think of rarely. And this distance gives these characters a certain credibility - the detachment lending a certain amount of realism to their make believe lives. It's because you don't know them - can't know them - inside and out that they feel much more realistic in relation to yourself. It's the closest any author has come to making a character a person. Also, Hiffenegger's ability to write scenes and settings is seldom surpassed. Each character deals with real life problems that are obviously carefully selected and tailored to that character, and the interactions dealing with those issues just add to your belief in their personal world.

All you need is love. Right?

Now, as far as this book in particular - I actually have read it twice, and had two completely different reactions to it. The frist time I read this book, I loved it. I completely sided with the over all love story and the idea that love can surpass all obstacles. Part of this reaction I believe has a lot to do with the stage my life was in when I read it. I actually had just recently started dating my boyfriend (now husband) and we read the book together - it's one of his favorites. So, I was already inclined to like the book because it had a love story and being an 18 year old girl, I wanted to believe in happy (though heart wrenching) endings and forever love. I think the easiest part of the story for me to connect to was Henry's need for Claire - he had to have her in his life or that life, as he knew it, would fall apart. I think that sort of obsession is easily to label as love when you are that young, and therefore have fewer experiances to relate to.

A life full of sadness is no life at all.

The second time I read this book was later in my life, around the age of 25 - after I was married for a few years and I read it on my own rather than with my husband again. The second time through I identified so strongly with Clarie - or at least the idea of Claire - that the story almost read like a horror novel. I'm not sure if it was that fact that I remembered some of what was going to happen to her, or my connection of actually being a wife now myself, but all I could think of was Claire and how she was always - ALWAYS - just waiting for the other shoe to drop. That's a horrible way to live your life and I personally could not come to terms with a love story where the other person (in this case, Henry) would expect and actually want the person they love to live that way. It was so heartbreaking - I can't remember the last time a book made me cry so much. Except for maybe the first time I read it with my husband - but of course the tears were for entirely different reasons.

Bottom line - would I recommend this book to someone else? Absolutely. But I would make damn sure the person I recommend this to is capable of dealing with whatever feelings this book might bestow upon them. And who knows - maybe I will pick this up again later in life when I don't feel like so much can be lost with each turn of the page.



Have you read this book? If so, what was your reaction? Let me know in the comments below! :)