The Time Traveler's Wife

I began this not expecting to like it...love story with a supernatural twist...meh.
It's FABULOUS (and I'm not easily impressed.)
Henry is a librarian who- for some inexplicable (genetic?) reason finds himself travelling through time. He has no control over when and where...he finds himself naked in the past...or the future. Necessitating much theft and fleeing, it's a dangerous problem. He meets his future love...aged six. He revisits past tragedies...and can go on ahead to see the outcome of certain issues. He meets up with himself as a youth...
With existential moments ...and with a real relevance to ACTUAL stuff...death, memory, people who were here but are no longer....or who are now in a whole different place ("did my child really show more play with his toys in this room?...he's an adult now") ...it's just a stunning piece of writing. show less

What a marvellous book, a bold mix of sci fi and romance that explores the human condition; life, love, death, friendship, parenthood, it’s all here. What makes it so clever and so effective is the fantastic lens that Niffenegger tells her story through. As a reader I got so wrapped up in the detail of the hero’s time travelling that it was only after I’d finished the book that the beauty and clarity of the insights it offers into what it means to be a human really sunk in. It’s gripping, funny, brilliant and very, very moving.

Meet Claire Abshire and Henry De Tamble, just a perfectly normal couple, except for the fact that Henry has Chrono-Displacement Disorder, which means he is a time traveler.

At its heart The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story, but one that’s more complicated than your average boy meets girl. The thing I love the most about this book is that it has an obvious gimmick - time travel, we know that from the title alone. It would have been so easy for Niffenegger to rely on that to tell the whole story. Instead she creates two beloved characters who feel so real that you root for them from the start. Henry and Claire feel like friends, people you could meet anywhere, and because of that the reader can suspend disbelief and embrace the show more time travel plot.

There’s no sugar-sweetness in this story. It has harsh moments where the reader finds Henry stranded somewhere in time or Claire is left alone for days, not knowing where he is. Just because he isn’t leaving intentionally doesn’t make it any easier for her when he’s gone. It also doesn’t mean that Claire or Henry are perfect people. They are selfish and flawed just like anyone else.

The thing that surprised me the most was that there is not a single sci-fi element in the book except time travel. Niffenegger treats Henry’s condition just like it’s any other disease, which removes any absurdity from the story. It’s a hurdle that complicates their lives, but it’s a reasonable one within the confines of the book.

In the end I fell in love with the story and the characters. It was one of those books I just couldn’t put down. I re-read it recently and loved it just as much the second time around. It felt like revisiting old friends in the way that only the best books can.

Side Note: I have read Her Fearful Symmetry, Niffenegger’s most recent novel, and I wasn’t too impressed. I also saw the movie version of Time Traveler and I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the book. show less

"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 show more 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. show less

I’m a huge fan of time travel stories and usually eat them up like candy. However, years ago, when The Time Traveler’s Wife first came to my attention, I took my time putting it on my TBR list. I’d heard some things about it that made me uncertain as to whether I would like it, but eventually something persuaded me to give it a try. I’m glad that I did and overall I enjoyed it. At its heart, this is a love story (not a romance and I can’t stress this enough) about two people whose love more or less transcends time. Their romantic relationship is deeply interwoven with our hero, Henry’s time traveling. He meets Clare’s younger self in the past, long after he’s married to her in the present. That connection then builds show more more and more over the years. I’m not usually a big reader of literary fiction, because I often find it rather boring. But this one held my attention pretty well even though it is slow-paced. Probably the thing that kept me reading the most was the time travel aspect, which is masterfully done. Even though it didn’t give me all the feels that a romance novel usually does, I did enjoy the love story, too, so overall this was a good read, even though it’s not my normal fare.

Henry is a librarian in Chicago, who suffers from a genetic anomaly known as chrono-impairment. However, he appears to be unique in that no one else he knows of has this condition. It causes him to travel both forwards and backwards in time and through space without much warning, something he’s been doing since he was six years old and over which he has no real control. Henry was the only child of two musically talented parents, but he possessed no musical ability himself. His mother died tragically and gruesomely in a car accident when he was just a little boy, something he bore witness to and survived. After that his dad basically checked out on life and became an alcoholic, so their downstairs neighbor, an older Korean woman became his surrogate parent. The time traveling proves very difficult for him, because he cannot take anything that isn’t part of his body with him, meaning that he wakes up in many strange places with no clothes or anything else to help him survive, so he ends up learning petty criminal skills. As he grew up, Henry also got involved in drugs, alcohol, womanizing and such, and was generally leading a life lacking in meaning or happiness until he met Clare at the age of twenty-eight. As it turns out, she had known him virtually all her life, but for him, he was meeting her for the first time. However, he felt an instant connection that translated into a soul-mate match, and they were completely inseparable after that. But Henry’s time traveling creates some wrinkles in their relationship and lots of drama as the years go by.

Clare grew up in a wealthy, but largely dysfunctional family, whom she loved in spite of their flaws. Next to her childhood home was a meadow where she often played, and one day, when she was six years old, a man appeared to her from out of nowhere. His name was Henry, he claimed to be a time traveler, and he periodically kept coming back. He was even able to give her a list of dates, letting her know when to expect him. Since months or even years might go by between his visits, she sometimes wondered if he was a figment of her imagination, but as she got older, she knew he was real and believed wholeheartedly in his claims of time travel. She also fell in love with him, but he refused to give her any information about the future other than that they would be together. Then one day at the age of twenty, she finally ran into him by accident at the library where he works. From there, they experienced a whirlwind affair that led to marriage. But having such an unusual husband means that she must deal with his sudden disappearances that can last hours, days, or even weeks at a time, which isn’t easy. She has her art to keep her busy, but more than anything she wants a child, something that proves very difficult to achieve.

Overall, The Time Traveler’s Wife was a good read. I liked both Henry and Clare as the main characters. They’re clearly soul-mates meant for each other. Even though Henry had a relationship with another woman and apparently had slept with many over the years, the minute he meets Clare, it’s as if all other women disappear. For Clare, Henry was it. She’d loved him since she was a young girl and that love was strong enough to make her wait patiently for him each and every time he disappeared on his time traveling jaunts. I have to give the author major props for keeping all the time lines straight and deftly weaving them together into a cohesive, chronological whole. She did a great job of differentiating where we are in time, so that I was never lost. I also liked how she played certain things out in one character’s perspective and later revisited it from the opposite POV. Where I had a few issues is that the story is a very slow-moving one that I could easily see boring some readers who prefer more action. Ultimately I think it was the intellectual nature of the time travel element that kept me engaged. Also the narrative has rather melancholy overtones throughout that gave the story a somewhat heavy feel. I think it might in part be owing to the dangerous and unpredictable nature of Henry’s time traveling as well as the sense that we’re kind of watching two lovers go through the ordinariness of life while dealing with an extraordinary problem. The book doesn’t have a particularly positive ending either, and the only reason I don’t think it entirely depressed me is because the author foreshadows this, so I was able to prepare my tender heart for what was coming. As a nearly life-long romance reader and now writer, I’m all about the HEAs and a more positive vibe, so not having that was a bit of detractor for me. Additionally there were some aspects that were left more ambiguous when I prefer for things to be spelled out more solidly. However, I realize that’s often the nature of literary fiction. Even though it didn’t completely blow me away, I did enjoy The Time Traveler’s Wife and look forward to checking out the movie. show less

What a well-constructed, well-executed, vapid, and self-congratulatory book this is! Street directions lifted from Google Maps stand in for the evocation of place, compulsive lists - authors, bands, sushi - stand in for characterization. American Psycho does this, but it is a sign of Patrick Bateman's sickness. Here is one particular offence:

"I peruse Henry's bookshelves. Here is the Henry I know. Donne's Elegies and Songs and Sonnets. Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Immanuel Kant. Barthes, Foucault, Derrida. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Winnie the Pooh. The Annotated Alice. Heidegger. Rilke. Tristram Shandy. Wisconsin Death Trip. Aristotle. Bishop Berkeley. Andrew Marvell. Hypothermia, Frostbite, and Other Cold show more Injuries."

But tell me - are the spines bent? Unbent? Are they all in the same edition? Are they shelved with care, alphabetically, by height, by width, by weight? Who is this Henry that you know? Who cares. The branding is all that matters.

The absolute nadir of this book is when time-travelling thirty-something hipster Henry sees a couple of teenage baby-punks at a family gathering. Over he bounds, and dictates to them a list of necessary bands. Inexplicably, they do not say, "F*ck off grandpa." Instead, they are awed and dutifully scribble down the canon. Truly, as they used to say in Smash Hits, it is like punk never happened. show less

I stayed up ten minutes late last night to finish this, not because I loved it so much that I couldn't put it down but because I really, really wanted to be done with it. I then inadvertently stayed up another hour after that, trying to stop myself from rehashing all the things I didn't like about the Time Traveler and his wife.

First and possibly most importantly this book is WAY TOO LONG. 531 pages in my paperback copy, with no plot aside from "two people love each other and one of them jumps around in time, which makes things a bit tricky on occasion." Most of these 531 pages consist of filler scenes that serve no purpose whatsoever. One well-drawn scene of Henry time-traveling and desperately seeking clothing/shelter would have show more covered it. Instead we see it what feels like a thousand times, with nothing changed except the incidental details. One scene involving the couple making coffee or eating foods I've never heard of would have been enough, but we are treated to an endless stream of such. And so on.

Equally important: I did not care about these characters in the least. Not even enough to dislike them. We are told a great deal, often quite repetitively, about What They Are Like (though mostly about What Henry Is Like). We rarely ever see it for real. For example he supposedly abused alcohol, drugs, and women. Never do we actually see this, just hear about it, and often secondhand. We are told that Clare is an artist but really, she could have been anything. The fact of her artist-ness has very little impact on the story.

For that matter, very little in this book has any impact on the story. So many pointless scenes -(Henry beating up the guy who nearly raped Clare, Clare sleeping with Gomez, the entirety of the element of Clare's mother's death, just to name a few) - that end up going nowhere. Even worse, the pointless details! Restaurant orders, games of pool, bands Henry likes, a literal grocery list of 32 items as Henry unpacks after shopping. Descriptions of things that could easily have been cut in half. SO MANY DESCRIPTIONS OF DREAMS. Surely no one on Earth enjoys hearing about another person's dreams, even less so when they are bogging down the plot of the book we are reading...

Oh, but, there is no plot! Henry and Clare love each other! We know this because they have sex with each other more than any other couple alive, and often in graphic detail! I did not buy their love for a minute. Aside from the endless and often cringey sex, we are given absolutely no reason to believe that these two had a love for the ages. I guess we are meant to accept that it was destiny, and let that be that. Or something.

Lastly - finally - I love a dual POV, when I can tell the narrators apart. Here I could not. Sometimes I'd get to a sentence that made it clear Henry was speaking, and realize I'd thought all along it was Clare. Character development lacking = I do not care about them at all = I don't believe their love = this book was not for me. show less