*SPOILER ALERT* This post contains spoilers. Don’t read it if you like to be surprised.
I just finished reading “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffeneggen. It was the longest I’ve spent reading a book this summer (about two and a half weeks), but for good reason. Personal reasons, but also because the jumping around confused me and kept me from wanting to pick it back up again. But I persevered and read about two hundred pages in the last three days. I’m glad I finished it.
The premise of “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is the following: 6-year-old girl (Clare) meets 41-year-old time traveling man (Henry). Over the years of Clare’s childhood, she discovers that she will one day marry this man. She meets him at various intervals in time, sometimes not for weeks, months, and at the longest, two years. Essentially, she is the one waiting for him while he is always off meeting her at various points in her own life. Henry time travels involuntarily and always arrives naked. Henry meets Clare for the first time in the present when he is 28; Clare is 20. It is when he is older that he time travels to visit Clare in her childhood. Henry and Clare marry when they are 30 and 22, respectively. Henry and Clare spend the rest of their married years dealing with him disappearing and her waiting for him to come back. Several miscarriages happen and Henry is informed that his time traveling is a “chrono-displaced disease.” Basically, there is something wrong with his DNA that is causing him to time travel (yeah, right). Genetic testing is done and time traveling mice are created, but there is no known cure to keep Henry in the present. Eventually, after six (my God) miscarriages, Henry and Clare finally give birth to baby Alba. At Henry’s distaste, Alba is gifted with this disease and will time travel sometime around the age of 7 or 8. In the end, Henry dies at the age of 43 when he is shot by his father-in-law in a hunting accident while he is time traveling to the meadow by Clare’s house when she is only 13. Alba is able to time travel to see her father in the past, but Clare has to wait 50 years before she sees Henry again, who time travels to her when she’s 82 and he’s 43. He leaves Clare a letter, informing her of this occasion, so that she’ll be waiting for him. Always waiting.
I could have gone into a lot more of the plot, but I didn’t want to confuse anybody. Besides, wasn’t that little synopsis confusing enough? This novel is a case of everything connecting by the end of the story and the whole thing makes sense in the end. It jumps around a lot and I was constantly having to go back to remember where in time it was. If you are thinking “Back to the Future” type of story, you are very wrong. If you remember, in Back to the Future, the characters that came from the future weren’t allowed to interact with themselves in the past due to a space-time continuum that would screw up future events. Yeah, that doesn’t apply to this story. Henry is constantly conversing with himself in whatever present he’s in. He’s also interacting with Clare, making babies with her while she’s with older Henry. It was all very mind boggling, to say the least.
Overall, I enjoyed the book very much. It was a great love story of how two people can work through many challenges and still be concerned and crazy for each other. A major criticism I have is how reserved Clare was throughout a lot of the book. I felt like her feelings weren’t portrayed as much as Henry’s and that she was just labeled as the “waiting wife.” From what I’ve seen from the trailer for the movie, Clare is very outspoken and doesn’t necessarily love the life that she’s living. I didn’t get that from the book at all. She was just, “Oh, Henry’s gone. I’m a little worried. Where is he? … Oh, there he is!” She did speak out a few times about how she’s always waiting around for him. Oh, and there was the one chapter where she expressed that she actually enjoyed her alone time and that she would go out and do things without leaving Henry a note saying where she was. Her reasoning was, “I don’t know where he went, so why does he have to know where I went?” Hmmmm, yeah.
This is a long book and there is a lot to it. I would recommend it if you have a lot of time on your hands. I would not suggest taking more than a couple of weeks to read it because you’ll forget what happened in different periods of time and then you’ll just be confused. If you like the concept of a love story lasting over time and if you’re okay with picturing Henry as Eric Bana (especially naked!), then you must read it! I would definitely put it in my top ten list of books.
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