The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger Nine out of 10…or is it 7 out of 10

 The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Nine out of 10…or is it 7 out of 10

 

 

This is an extremely popular novel, with more than one million votes on what may be the most relevant reader’s site, goodreads, which compares more than favorably with classic, acclaimed opera, albeit the critics seem to have appreciated The Time Traveler’s Wife too, including it on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction

 

The author, Audrey Niffenegger appears to have been unhappy in her relationships, just like Rosamund Lehman before writing The Echoing Grove http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-echoing-grove-by-rosamund-lehmann.html and then both have been inspired by their experiences to create appreciate stories…

Although yours truly has been engaged in the antics of the Time Traveler, his wife, her mother and father, his father, some friends and quite a number of other personages, important or just playing supporting roles, but only up to the point where I realized that this is a seventeen hours long rad and maybe there are other, even more rewarding novels than this is.

 

The proposition is enticing, enchanting in fact and the proof is that after millions have finished this narrative, they have expressed on average their pleasure, with a rating of about four out of five stars, a movie has been made, based on the book with Eric Bana and Rachel MacAdams – and yes, time travel has always appealed to us.

Furthermore, this reader was thinking that it is not just possible, we do it and it is recommended by positive psychology – when you reminisce and think of the past, you bring joy in the present, with memories of your child – such as taking mine to the fortified church of Ghimbav, near the small town where we lived for about three years, when she was just a baby – and if the recollections are not just positive, it could help to write about them, for it was studied and revealed that when you write, what does not make sense otherwise, begins to have a logic exposed by writing and also we detach from something we put in writing…

 

There is another happiness exercise, called ‘Imagine the Best Possible Future’, wherein you would be the Time Traveler, his Wife maybe, and you again bring wellbeing into the present – which a quote says that ‘it is the only one we have’- and besides, you bring that ‘Best Possible Outcome closer to you and more likely, like the famous Roger Bannister, the doctor and athlete who was the first to run the mile under four minutes, although that had been declared humanely impossible, but since he had decided he can do it, he had worked hard and then accomplished it.

The Time Traveler is Henry DeTamble and he suffers from a rare genetic disorder that allows him to travel through time, a unique gift that some, perhaps a multitude would envy – the under signed is not so sure, though he thought it could be nice to go back to change some things – which the protagonist of this narrative will not do, even if in another science fiction work it is stated that one could alter the past, because then the future will also be changed, since we have different, alternative universes, not just one outcome and that is it…evidently, the objection to this would be that one might then change the past in such a way as to make…himself impossible, by eliminating his or her birth from the picture…

 

Henry keeps encountering his would be wife, the heroine of the title, Clare Anne Abshire, at different stages of their lives, he is eight years older, but he comes into her life when she is only twelve, he is naked as a result of his time travel, she has to give him clothes and feed him, and while she would like to have sex at a different stage, the decent and moral Time Traveler would not engage in what would be statutory rape.

He does not control though his frequent lapses into time traveling, which could be prompted by stress – thus a friend offers him a concoction of drugs at one point, but that almost knocks him off, sending him close to death.

 

The hero avoids flying and he tells Clare that he worries that it could be a problem, perhaps impossible to return from a very different date, to rejoin a machine flying at over three hundred miles per hour…it could be impossible and he does not want to find himself trapped somewhere between times, so to say…

Alongside the challenging, mind bending ideas of time travel, there are plenty of other subjects in here, ranging from the movie It’s A Wonderful Life – which Henry has not seen, to the dismay of others, but he does not have a television set, which is also shocking, only he does his condition and the set could provoke his departures to other dimensions in time – to the music of Depeche Mode, The Cure and many other bands are mentioned.

 

In cat, his father is a violinist at the Chicago orchestra, and the family of his girlfriend, when he meets them for the first time, would want his father to listen to a tape _no mp3 then – but since he does not give lessons, it would not be feasible, and then also, the parent would descent into such a decay that when his son is visiting his room, something appears to be literally decaying in there, he has not paid the rent, Mrs. Kim, the woman who helps him and is a f4eind of the family and he drinks to the point of self-destruction…Henry’s mother had died, but she had been so well known and appreciated that the Abshire family has all her recordings and they even think that the son looks like her, once they find about their relation.

There are plenty of other subplots, meetings with friends of Clare, when she is still a teenager and one suspects that Henry is the boyfriend and he has to pretend that he is a friend of the parents, present outside a party just in case she will have drunk alcohol – but she never does, says the friend…yes, I know, the parents have been over cautious- there is also a meeting with a former girlfriend and a scene, an African American woman comes to Clare to warn her about Henry and then he has to try and explain that this was in the ‘past’ – whatever that means for the story – and once he has met Clare, in less than 24 hours he has put an end to that…and yes, this is a thread we can follow, but for myself, not for seventeen hours…I stopped somewhere after nine and maybe I will have missed a lot.