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The Time Traveler's Wife (Paperback) (Paperback)
by Audrey Niffenegger
| Category:
Love story, Time travel, fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Audrey Niffenegger's novel is a vivid exploration of love that can survive anything. |
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Author: Audrey Niffenegger
Publisher: Harvest Books
Pub. in: May, 2004
ISBN: 015602943X
Pages: 560
Measurements: 7.8 x 5.7 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00274
Other information: Reprint edition
ISBN-13: 978-0156029438
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- Awards & Credential -
National Bestseller, The New York Times Bestseller |
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- MSL Picks -
This is a poignant and deeply moving piece of fiction that deals intimately with being human, being in love, and what fate does to rip us apart as minions of its whim. The havoc that Henry's affliction (moving back in forth in time, reliving and effecting moments in his past and future) plays on his and Clare's destiny is sometimes delightful, sometimes horrifying, but always mesmerizing and tinged with a sadness caused by the inability to simply exist in a linear capacity, a trait this novel makes us realize we all take for granted.
Time travel is something Niffenegger depicts in the most un-science fictiony style imaginable, written more like a Greek tragedy set in the 80's and 90's than anything else (with pop culture references to bands, names, places and events that anyone conscious in that time will appreciate). The intense love between the two main characters, their dedication to each other and against the world, their human weakness and desperation is made so gorgeously real every sorrow they feel is yours, and every moment of happiness is like a breath of fresh air.
This is an amazing novel. If you are interested at all in serious fiction, and enjoy a good tragedy, take a look at The Time Travelers Wife.
Target readers:
General readers
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Audrey Niffenegger is a professor in the M.F.A. program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. This is her first novel, which in hardcover was a selection of Today’s Book Club. She lives in Chicago.
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A dazzling novel in the most untraditional 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.
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THE MAN
OUT OF TIME
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
...Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,-just what is wholly
unsayable.
- from The Ninth Duino Elegy,
RAINER MARIA RILKE,
translated by STEPHEN MITCHELL
FIRST DATE, ONE
Saturday, October 26, 1991 (Henry is 28, Clare is 20)
CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble. I sign the Visitors' Log: Clare Abshire, 11:15 10-26-91 Special Collections. I have never been in the Newberry Library before, and now that I've gotten past the dark, foreboding entrance I am excited. I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books. The elevator is dimly lit, almost silent. I stop on the third floor and fill out an application for a Reader's Card, then I go upstairs to Special Collections. My boot heels rap the wooden floor. The room is quiet and crowded, full of solid, heavy tables piled with books and surrounded by readers. Chicago autumn morning light shines through the tall windows. I approach the desk and collect a stack of call slips. I'm writing a paper for an art history class. My research topic is the Kelmscott Press Chaucer. I look up the book itself and fill out a call slip for it. But I also want to read about papermaking at Kelmscott. The catalog is confusing. I go back to the desk to ask for help. As I explain to the woman what I am trying to find, she glances over my shoulder at someone passing behind me. "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you," she says. I turn, prepared to start explaining again, and find myself face to face with Henry.
I am speechless. Here is Henry, calm, clothed, younger than I have ever seen him. Henry is working at the Newberry Library, standing in front of me, in the present. Here and now. I am jubilant. Henry is looking at me patiently, uncertain but polite.
"Is there something I can help you with?" he asks.
"Henry!" I can barely refrain from throwing my arms around him. It is obvious that he has never seen me before in his life.
"Have we met? I'm sorry, I don't...." Henry is glancing around us, worrying that readers, co-workers are noticing us, searching his memory and realizing that some future self of his has met this radiantly happy girl standing in front of him. The last time I saw him he was sucking my toes in the Meadow.
I try to explain. "I'm Clare Abshire. I knew you when I was a little girl..." I'm at a loss because I am in love with a man who is standing before me with no memories of me at all. Everything is in the future for him. I want to laugh at the weirdness of the whole thing. I'm flooded with years of knowledge of Henry, while he's looking at me perplexed and fearful. Henry wearing my dad's old fishing trousers, patiently quizzing me on multiplication tables, French verbs, all the state capitals; Henry laughing at some peculiar lunch my seven-year-old self has brought to the Meadow; Henry wearing a tuxedo, undoing the studs of his shirt with shaking hands on my eighteenth birthday. Here! Now! "Come and have coffee with me, or dinner or something...." Surely he has to say yes, this Henry who loves me in the past and the future must love me now in some bat-squeak echo of other time. To my immense relief he does say yes. We plan to meet tonight at a nearby Thai restaurant, all the while under the amazed gaze of the woman behind the desk, and I leave, forgetting about Kelmscott and Chaucer and floating down the marble stairs, through the lobby and out into the October Chicago sun, running across the park scattering small dogs and squirrels, whooping and rejoicing.
HENRY: It's a routine day in October, sunny and crisp. I'm at work in a small windowless humidity-controlled room on the fourth floor of the Newberry, cataloging a collection of marbled papers that has recently been donated. The papers are beautiful, but cataloging is dull, and I am feeling bored and sorry for myself. In fact, I am feeling old, in the way only a twenty-eight-year-old can after staying up half the night drinking overpriced vodka and trying, without success, to win himself back into the good graces of Ingrid Carmichel. We spent the entire evening fighting, and now I can't even remember what we were fighting about. My head is throbbing. I need coffee. Leaving the marbled papers in a state of controlled chaos, I walk through the office and past the page's desk in the Reading Room. I am halted by Isabelle's voice saying, "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you," by which she means "Henry, you weasel, where are you slinking off to?" And this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl turns around and looks at me as though I am her personal Jesus. My stomach lurches. Obviously she knows me, and I don't know her. Lord only knows what I have said, done, or promised to this luminous creature, so I am forced to say in my best librarianese, "Is there something I can help you with?" The girl sort of breathes "Henry!" in this very evocative way that convinces me that at some point in time we have a really amazing thing together. This makes it worse that I don't know anything about her, not even her name. I say "Have we met?" and Isabelle gives me a look that says You asshole. But the girl says, "I'm Clare Abshire. I knew you when I was a little girl," and invites me out to dinner. I accept, stunned. She is glowing at me, although I am unshaven and hung over and just not at my best. We are going to meet for dinner this very evening, at the Beau Thai, and Clare, having secured me for later, wafts out of the Reading Room. As I stand in the elevator, dazed, I realize that a massive winning lottery ticket chunk of my future has somehow found me here in the present, and I start to laugh. I cross the lobby, and as I run down the stairs to the street I see Clare running across Washington Square, jumping and whooping, and I am near tears and I don't know why.
Later that evening:
HENRY: At 6:00 p.m. I race home from work and attempt to make myself attractive. Home these days is a tiny but insanely expensive studio apartment on North Dearborn; I am constantly banging parts of myself on inconvenient walls, countertops and furniture. Step One: unlock seventeen locks on apartment door, fling myself into the living room-which-is-also-my-bedroom and begin stripping off clothing. Step Two: shower and shave. Step Three: stare hopelessly into the depths of my closet, gradually becoming aware that nothing is exactly clean. I discover one white shirt still in its dry cleaning bag. I decide to wear the black suit, wing tips, and pale blue tie. Step Four: don all of this and realize I look like an FBI agent. Step Five: look around and realize that the apartment is a mess. I resolve to avoid bringing Clare to my apartment tonight even if such a thing is possible. Step Six: look in full-length bathroom mirror and behold angular, wild-eyed 6' 1" ten-year-old Egon Schiele look-alike in clean shirt and funeral director suit. I wonder what sorts of outfits this woman has seen me wearing, since I am obviously not arriving from my future into her past wearing clothes of my own. She said she was a little girl? A plethora of unanswerables runs through my head. I stop and breathe for a minute. Okay. I grab my wallet and my keys, and away I go: lock the thirty-seven locks, descend in the cranky little elevator, buy roses for Clare in the shop in the lobby, walk two blocks to the restaurant in record time but still five minutes late. Clare is already seated in a booth and she looks relieved when she sees me. She waves at me like she's in a parade.
"Hello," I say. Clare is wearing a wine-colored velvet dress and pearls. She looks like a Botticelli by way of John Graham: huge gray eyes, long nose, tiny delicate mouth like a geisha. She has long red hair that covers her shoulders and falls to the middle of her back. Clare is so pale she looks like a waxwork in the candlelight. I thrust the roses at her. "For you."
"Thank you," says Clare, absurdly pleased. She looks at me and realizes that I am confused by her response. "You've never given me flowers before."
I slide into the booth opposite her. I'm fascinated. This woman knows me; this isn't some passing acquaintance of my future hegiras. The waitress appears and hands us menus.
"Tell me," I demand.
"What?"
"Everything. I mean, do you understand why I don't know you? I'm terribly sorry about that-"
"Oh, no, you shouldn't be. I mean, I know...why that is." Clare lowers her voice. "It's because for you none of it has happened yet, but for me, well, I've known you for a long time."
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| View all 15 comments |
Judy Wagner (MSL quote), Corona del Mar, CA USA
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This novel is not Sci-Fi although it is often referred to as such. This is literary fiction and a truly original and gripping love story. You'll find it hard to put down once you start reading.
I've heard that the publishers had trouble marketing this book at first because they didn't know how to categorize it. It's Literary Fiction with the interesting twist of believable time travel and a love story that will touch your heart and leave you in tears.
The only thing I can think of to compare it to is the movie "Somewhere in Time". If you liked the movie, this book is a must read.
If you're looking for fantasy and wizards, this is not the book for you.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-23 00:00>
Audrey Niffenegger has taken Jack Finney's "Time and Again" and enhanced it with David Jerrold's "The Man Who Folded Himself" to create something that I believe is totally new. In literature this is a rare achievement, and Niffenegger must be given credit and recognition for original thought.
Her central character is a time traveler as a result of a genetic disorder. The reader must not look for science in her plot: time travel is just a vehicle to explore human emotions and motivations beyond anything in human experience. Suspension of disbelief comes with extraordinary language and tangible emotion rather than a plausible scientific explanation.
"The Time Traveler's Wife" is essentially a love story that tests love and dedication beyond anything from Shakespeare. Worlds are created and remade constantly, almost dizzyingly, as the central character flips between past, present and future, bringing with him bitterness and joy and damnable foreknowledge, and an absolute determination to preserve free will. Time travel without bifurcating universes would preclude free will, so Niffenegger turns this paradox into deeply moving emotions. The reader knows what is inevitable but keeps searching between the lines for salvation.
The book is disorienting at first, and many will put it down, but the story does come together to become manageable in the mind and is very worthy of a re-read once the structure is understood. I was constantly astounded by Niffenegger's skill: her ability to maintain continuity in a very, very complex intersection of timelines and dates, and to do all of this in first-person recollections using beautiful language that seems natural and organic. Matheson's "Bid Time Return" (Somewhere in Time) generated similar emotions, but Niffenegger takes it so much further. Stick with this book. It is truly unique.
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B Wookiee (MSL quote), San Antonio, TX
<2007-01-23 00:00>
"The Time Traveler's Wife" is the best book I've read this year.
Niffenegger masterfully weaves together a time travel story with a romance. Her two lead characters, Henry and Clare are two of the most beautiful, realistic HUMAN characters I have ever read. They show the reader the true definition of unconditional love. They're accepting of eachother and their relationship is loving and complex. Their romance is moving in the same way as the two lovers is "The Notebook" (the movie, not the book).
Despite the unchronological ordering of the scenes throughout the novel, The Time Traveler's Wife is a continous mystery and it unravels sensibly and beautifully.
Read this book!
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J. Gardner (MSL quote), Maryland
<2007-01-23 00:00>
I've a copy of this one in my bedside table because every now and then I like to get it out and read a few pages, because it makes me feel good.
I smile at this book because its essentially a stream of consciousness story told by two lovers who are very honest with their emotions and each other. Neffenegger's writing achieves a sense of honesty and depth that I enjoy very much, but have a difficult time finding in the modern bookstore. Its quite an achievement, I think, to have set a story with this high level of personal realism within a plot that is entirely implausible.
In another sense, however, the constant separations and disappearances are a very powerful tool to explore the threads, power, and pain of love. I would have enjoyed these two wonderful characters regardless of the context.
Neffenegger's portrayal of love and what it means to her was very well done. I'd be inclined to read anything else she'd written, expecting the same high quality.
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