"A man has the ability to travel in time and revisit their love story ... Clare and Henry form a seemingly normal couple, they love and try to be happy. However, Henry suffers from a strange illness that led him to travel back in time, which allowed him to meet Clare when he was a child and sentenced him to face his uncertain, and perhaps tragic future. A very original and charming story about the passage of time and the endurance of love that surely fascinated from the first page."
Summary
Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Henry DeTamble (born 1963), a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and his wife, Clare Anne Abshire (born 1971), an artist who makes paper sculptures. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which comes to be known as Chrono-Displacement, that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library in 1991 at the opening of the novel, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life.
Henry begins time traveling at the age of five, jumping forward and backward relative to his own timeline. When he leaves, where he goes, or how long his trips will last are all beyond his control. His destinations are tied to his subconscious—he most often travels to places and times related to his own history. Certain stimuli such as stress can trigger Henry's time traveling; he often goes jogging to keep calm and remain in the present. He also searches out pharmaceuticals in the future that may be able to help control his time traveling. He also seeks the advice of a geneticist, Dr. Kendrick. Henry cannot take anything with him into the future or the past; he always arrives naked and then struggles to find clothing, shelter, and food. He amasses a number of survival skills including lock-picking, self-defense, and pickpocketing. Much of this he learns from older versions of himself.
"It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays."
-Clare-
Genre
Reviewers have found The Time Traveler's Wife difficult to classify generically: some categorize it as science fiction, others as a romance. Niffenegger herself is reluctant to label the novel, saying she "never thought of it as science fiction, even though it has a science-fiction premise". In Niffenegger's view, the story is primarily about Henry and Clare's relationship and the struggles they endure. She has said that she based Clare and Henry's romance on the "cerebral coupling" of Dorothy Sayers's characters Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.
Time travel stories to which the novel has been compared include Jack Finney's Time and Again (1970) and the film Somewhere in Time (1980). Henry has been compared to Billy Pilgrim of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Science fiction writer Terence M. Green calls the novel a "timeslip romance". The Time Traveler's Wife is not as concerned with the paradoxes of time travel as is traditional science fiction. Instead, as critic Marc Mohan describes, the novel "uses time travel as a metaphor to explain how two people can feel as if they've known each other their entire lives".
Audrey Niffenegger
Audrey Niffenegger (born June 13, 1963 in South Haven, Michigan) trained as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received her MFA from Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice. She has exhibited her artist’s books, prints, paintings, drawings and comics at Printworks Gallery in Chicago since 1987. Her first books were printed and bound by hand in editions of ten. Two of these have since been commercially published by Harry N. Abrams: The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters.
Initially imagined as a graphic novel, Niffenegger realized that her idea for a book about a time traveler and his wife would be difficult to represent in still images. She began to work on the project as a novel, and published The Time Traveler’s Wife in 2003 with the independent publisher MacAdam/Cage. It was an international best seller, and has been made into a movie.
Niffenegger helped to found a new book arts center, the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. Niffenegger was part of this group and has taught book arts and fiction writing there, as well as the Newberry Library, Penland School of Craft and other institutions of higher learning.
Niffenegger is a founding member of the writing collective Text 3 (T3), who publish the litmag little Bang. Niffenegger’s second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, was published in 2009. In 2008 she made a serialized graphic novel for the London Guardian, The Night Bookmobile, which was published in book form in September, 2010. She is working on her third novel, The Chinchilla Girl in Exile. She has lived in or near Chicago for most of her life.
The Review
"The first time I saw the book's title could not help thinking something like "here we go again with the typical story about time travel" so I did not pay any attention. Only after a while I decided to start reading it, not because he had a special interest in him, but because my list of outstanding books and was running out.Novels and stories that deal with time travel so there are many, in my opinion, the difficulty of addressing this issue is no longer talking about what's happening in the past, if this can be changed, how it could be the future and so on., the difficulty really is to deal with a matter that we have all heard and making it practically new. I believe that this novel approach has succeeded in giving the matter quite original.The first thing we find is an unusual character, one who just do not want to relive the past, much less face the future. To Henry his "ability" often a curse because it can not control what you do or where to go. To give it even more interesting when Henry travels in time lose the clothes and all that carry over into the time so each time shift also becomes a struggle for survival.The co-protagonist of this novel is also very important because everything revolves around it. Since childhood, Clare, has had the opportunity to talk and meet a mysterious man who has always refused to answer questions about what will happen in the future. All he knows is that he will be her future husband and all that she is living, the real Henry will not know where they are known as all her past trips to be made where they are already married. Is not it interesting?To really see if it is original or not, I think he's talking about a plot of this book and I will divide it into three and I will explain briefly what it's each to yourself you can decide.The first part focuses primarily on the growth of Clare and the strange relationship with Henry, which will be for her a father, a mentor, a friend and eventually her partner and husband. How does this affect the life of the young? How does the condition? These and many other things raised in this first part enganchándote from the first page.After all these years finally the inevitable happens is that Henry meets Clare and the two marry. This, very briefly, the start of the second part of the story which will mainly focus on the difficulties that have to be happy. This is when you actually see it back in time for the protagonist is not so happy as to see his wife as a child. Unable to control it always runs the risk of disappearing at the most inconvenient thing that greatly hinders their attempts to live a normal happy life with the girl he wants.Nor is it easy to accept the "disease" of her husband and constantly living with the uncertainty of not knowing whether Henry will this time or not and does not know what state you'll find when you return.The novel continues to flow unabated, telling you everything you need to get to know the characters, to understand them and worry about what might happen. So without realizing it leads to the third party, where everything comes together the mosaic finally ending in a shocking end which I will not reveal. Obviously.If the story itself grabs the reader and forcing him to read more and more, the way it is written is the perfect support for giving strength to finish the novel.All that is told, is written in first person, from the point of view of Clare such as Henry. This dual perspective on things, it helps to understand things and see how they think the characters and how they feel. Another equally interesting thing is that in this way, we see only what someone is telling us by giving us a demo of the facts, which might then be complemented by the other partner.Finally another thing worth noting is how well the novel is structured and how well designed they are temporary breaks. The author manages to keep the suspense as they often know what will happen in the future but why not and vice versa.In conclusion, this novel would recommend it to all science fiction readers who want to read something original, why not also to all those who, although not of this kind, want to read a beautiful love story. 100% Recommended, I do not regret having read it and I encourage everyone to read"
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