The Time Traveler's Wife

by Audrey Niffenegger

Paperback, 2004

Call number

FIC NIF

Collection

Publication

Harcourt (2004), 546 pages

Description

Clare and Henry, deeply in love, try desperately to maintain normal lives even though he has been diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition in which his genetic clock periodically resets, pulling him through time to the past or future.

Media reviews

The triumph of the book is the triumph of normality, of setting up a decent family life even if you are constantly dissappearing from it, of being loyal to somebody with what Niffenegger finally explains as a genetic dysfunction - chrono-displacement, as she calls it.
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"The Time Traveler's Wife" can be an exasperating read, but as a love story it has its appeal: Refreshingly, the novel portrays long-term commitment as something lively and exuberant rather than dutiful and staid, evoking both the comforts it brings us and the tribulations we learn to live with.
Niffenegger, despite her moving, razor-edged prose, doesn't claim to be a romantic. She writes with the unflinching yet detached clarity of a war correspondent standing at the sidelines of an unfolding battle. She possesses a historian's eye for contextual detail. This is no romantic idyll.
About halfway through Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, you realize you're going to be devastated. You love the characters, you're deeply involved in their lives, you can sense tragedy coming and you know it's going to hurt. But there's no way you can stop reading...
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Niffenegger structures the novel clearly enough that the timelines never get tangled, and her writing is so strong you'd keep going even if you did get confused.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member Jargoneer
Love story with a difference: husband randomly time travels.

Why is this book so bad?

Firstly, it is severely overwritten, as many recent novels are - probably 150 pages too long. Niffenegger can't help explaining everything in detail even when it doesn't matter. Do we really need to spend pages on
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the heroine making paper? Or paragraphs detailing menus or music they liked? And so on. It felt like Niffenegger had done research on certain topics and she was going to include it whether or not it was cogent.

The main couple, Henry and Claire, seem less real people than 'cool' constructs - they like 'cool' ethnic food; Henry is a 'punk' (ha ha) but only likes the 'cool' punk bands; they have 'cool' artistic/literary jobs; they have 'cool' friends who want to make the world a better place, and so on. Niffenberger can't stop (see point above) telling us how 'cool' and 'meaningful' their lifestyle is. These are not characters drawn from real life, they have escaped from bad romance novels.

The other characters are worse. Claire's one alternative to Henry in the novel is Gomez, Henry's best friend and best man, who we know can't be all good because he is a lawyer (albeit one that helps the poor and needy...). He is a sleezebag. You would think Niffenegger would want to create a decent alternative to give some poignancy to Claire's situation. Then we have the parents - both Claire and Henry have troubled parents: Claire's father is distant (we know he has problems - he's a real lawyer), and her mother is distant because she has personal problems (she also writes poetry and when she dies, Claire finds a poem written about her and everything is OK); Henry's mother, an Opera singer, died in car crash that he escaped from due to his ability to 'time jump', and his father, a first violinist, turns to drink and becomes distant (he is cured when Claire has a child). Henry is supposedly traumatised by his mother's death and constantly revisits the scene time travelling but we never see that, we only get told it - yet again Niffenegger misses a trick.
Now we get to the really disturbing characters - the nice ethnic caricatures: the nice Korean woman downstairs who looks after Henry when his father is drunk, and the nice black cook who looks after Claire when her mother is being distant. It's good to know that 70 years after Gone with the Wind minority characters still know their place. (Mind you, to be fair, so does Claire - waiting patiently for 40 years or so for Henry to return).

As for the time travelling, I'm not bothered by the silly explanation of why Henry can time travel, after all it's just a conceit. I am bothered however by the lack of imagination and adventure Niffenegger exhibits when dealing with it. (I'm not going to comment on the slightly disturbing aspects of a grown man visiting a young girl and 'grooming' her to be his wife). Niffenegger never discusses anything remotely interesting about time travel - it is only exists in service of a very cliched love story. Even the structure of the novel sidetracks the issues of time travel by following Claire's timeline, hence creating a more or less linear narrative. Despite being marketed as upmarket, this novel has all the intellectual rigour of a marshmallow.

Recommended for those who can't read and think simultaneously; for everyone else, avoid.
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LibraryThing member mrtall
The Time Traveler’s Wife has been reviewed below as a sci-fi book about time travel. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s in fact chicklit par excellence, with the time travel aspect introduced as a very clever device (kudos, Ms Niffenegger) that adds texture and novelty to an utterly
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romantic plot. As such, it’s well done. I can’t really bear much bodice-ripping, but this book managed to hold my interest long enough to finish. It’s long – 519 pages – but an incredibly fast read. Niffenegger has a good sense of pacing, and she constructs some affecting scenes that stick in your head after you’ve finished the book. You can’t say she’s an untalented writer.

But there are several aspects of the book I just couldn’t stomach.

First, the time travel enables the love story between the star-struck lovers, Henry and Clare, to begin when he’s an adult, and she’s a very young child. The scenes in which they meet as such are more than a little creepy. Similarly, the scenes in which Clare’s in her teens and still meeting with (and working feverishly to seduce) a fully-adult Henry read like schoolgirl fantasies about Sexy Teacher.

Second, although I didn’t expect the kind of attention to the intricacies of time travel you’d find in a genuine sci-fi novel here, the liberties Niffenegger takes are pretty gross. She steamrolls all the traditional paradoxes of time travel – the time traveler meeting himself, his effect on the timeline when he changes things in the past, etc.

Finally, although Henry and Clare are depicted relentlessly as being extraordinary people, their characters are really quite conventional. Coincidentally – perhaps serendipitously – I read this novel at just the same time I discovered the marvelously satirical website ‘Stuff White People Like’. It was like fireworks going off: I realized that Henry and Clare are the Whitest characters in American fiction.

To close out my review, therefore, I’ve assembled a list of the things Henry and Clare like that coincide with SWPL’s list (which was up to #80 at the time of writing). I could have added more, but finding the correspondences was so easy I stuck to highlights. My list doesn’t include any real spoilers, but if you’ve not yet read the book, you might want to skip it. Oh, and please, please remember that my little list is meant to be just as satirical as the website!!

So here goes:

#1 Coffee
Henry is frequently in urgent need of coffee – those time jumps are thirsty work! – and he and Clare patronize a non-chain, atmospheric, ‘authentic’ coffee house. In fact, there’s one scene that revolves around Clare and Henry labeling themselves ‘Coffee Fiends’!

#2 Religions that their parents don’t belong to
Henry is Jewish, but rejects Judaism; Clare likewise rejects the Catholicism of her youth.

#7 Diversity
In addition to their multi-ethnic circle of friends, Clare has grown up with Nell, an African-American cook who's so knowing and wise and life-affirming that no one other than Morgan Freeman would dare play her in the movie version. And, not to be outdone, Henry’s been looked after by ‘Kimy’, Nell’s Korean-American counterpart.

#9 Making you feel bad about not going outside
All the time. Note that Henry and Clare’s most poignant moments occur in a verdant, pastoral setting.

#11 Asian Girls
Well, Clare has to be white, since this is a book for white women, but Henry and Clare’s friend Gomez (who, despite the Hispanic-sounding nickname, is actually very, very White) is allowed to marry Charisse, a Filipina (while still secretly nurturing his deep, true love for Clare, of course).

#14 Having Black Friends
Yes, of course – the super-funky Celia is tokened very neatly into the plot.

#16 “Gifted” Children
Henry and Clare are both gifted children, plus there’s another kid in the book who’s the mostest giftedest kid you ever heard of! She’s a prodigy.

#17 Hating their parents
Ohhhhh baby. Clare hates both of her parents, and Henry hates his father. He probably would hate his mother, too, but she had the good taste to get killed when he was a kid, so she’s exempt.

#19 Traveling
Henry’s affliction makes ordinary travel difficult, but what’s the first section in the bookstore Clare checks out? Travel, of course. And really, what more exotic form of travel can you imagine than time travel itself?

#26 Manhattan (now Brooklyn too!)
No, but this is a Chicago book, and Niffenegger thinks it’s important you know that Hyde Park resembles Cambridge, which is a really classy place.

#27 Marathons
No, but Henry runs every single morning, even when it’s chucking down rain.

#28 Not Having a TV
Not only do Henry and Clare not have a TV, watching that nasty boob tube makes Henry sick. He’s genetically evolved to a point at which watching TV isn’t even possible!!

#30 Wrigley Field
Yes, of course Wrigley gets a shout-out in this Chicago-set book.

#34 Architecture
A whole page of the novel is devoted to Henry’s feelings about Chicago architecture.

#37 Renovations
Clare wants to buy a Victorian fixer-upper when she and Henry go house shopping.

#40 Apple Products
Who uses a Mac? Clare uses a Mac!

#41 Indie Music
I could go on for paragraphs here discussing the ‘cool bands’ name-dropping Niffenegger indulges in, but that would be just as indulgent . . . .

#42 Sushi
Do Henry and Clare love sushi? On page 282 they experience the ‘intrinsic happiness of sushi’. This phrase may represent the apotheosis of their whiteness.

#43 Plays
Not quite, but Henry and Clare do hold box seats at the opera, which is even better.

#44 Public Radio
Harry’s parents are both professional classical musicians, so he’s a product of an NPR-approved union.

#45 Asian Fusion Food
Multiple dinners at ‘Beau Thai’? Say no more!

#46 The Sunday New York Times
Clare is involved in a touching scene in which she helps her blind grandma complete the NYT crossword.

#47 Arts Degrees
Henry majored in English Lit, and of course Clare’s an artist.

#49 Vintage
Oh, yes. When Henry finally breaks down and buys a TV so Clare can watch something, it’s a vintage model he gets for 10 bucks. And Clare shops at George’s Vintage Clothing.

#50 Irony
It’s all over the book, but the best example is when Henry and Clare sit down with their diverse friends Gomez and Charisse to play their self-invented, über-ironic version of Monopoly called ‘Modern Capitalist Mind F-word-that-rhymes-with-duck’. That’s rich, indeed!

#51 Living by the water
Not only does Henry’s father’s apartment overlook the Chicago River, just witness the lavish descriptions of the beach, waves, etc. when Henry and Clare visit her family, who live in a mansion on the shores of Lake Michigan.

#54 Kitchen Gadgets
Not precisely, but note how integral Henry’s ability to cook/manage the kitchen is to Niffenegger’s delineation of his character.

#55 Apologies
Henry and Clare engage in repeated apologies to numerous other characters, plus each other. Their ability to phrase their apologies in ways that make them look like strong, mature, thoroughly well-adjusted persons provides fodder for several of the books most ‘serious’ passages.

#56 Lawyers
Gomez is a noble heroic Marxist lawyer who's devoted his life to helping poor people.

#62 Knowing what’s best for poor people
See immediately above; also, both Henry and Clare sure know how to deal with those poor people who cook and clean up for them!

#67 Standing Still at Concerts
Wait – Henry and Clare do go to a punk concert, and they stand around for a while, but then they dance. Guess we have to have an exception that proves the rule.

#70 Difficult Breakups
Oh, yeah – they don’t get much messier than Henry’s breakup with Ingrid.

#71 Being the only white person around
Well, the only white couple, at least, at Henry’s 43rd birthday party.

#72 Study Abroad
If it hadn’t been for Henry turning up all the time during her childhood, Clare would definitely have studied abroad because she’s a trust fund kid.

#78 Multilingual Children
Henry seems to grow up trilingual, although it’s not really explained how he learns German and French. On the other hand, as she's in the throes of labor, Clare does muster the energy to force Henry to quote Rilke in English instead of the German, so perhaps there's some subtle problematizing of the 'ideal' of multilingualism going on here.
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LibraryThing member whitewavedarling
I'd have to say that it's been over a decade since I gave serious thought to not finishing a book--I'm meticulous about finishing books that I start. That said, I gave serious thought to throwing this book away unfinished when I was halfway through. As is, it will be the first book in years that I
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give away without any desire to hold it for my own library.

This may be a page-turner, but it is constantly sad, tragic, and depressing. The writing isn't bad, but it's also not anything worth reading for its own beauty and worth. Niffenegger came up with a good premise for a story, but left out those aspects which could make the book redeemable, or great.

First, the interest of a romance book comes from the characters falling in love with one another, and from conflict. Here, it is ONLY conflict. The characters are simply in love with each other, but though we see their whole relationship, we never see them fall for one another. It's circular, which I suppose was either an oversight or an easy answer from the author--either way, it's a frustration once one sees what's happening. Henry is in love with Clare because she's fallen in love with him. However, Clare is in love with Henry because he was in love with her when he met her (her having already fallen in love with him). It would be simple enough to show each character falling in love, but we see none of it. Both characters at different points are either entirely in love or simply not in love. If you think about this, you'll see it's true, though the author's fast-moving plot (however predictable it is) does a good job of masking this huge aspect that she has, simply, left unwritten and unmentioned.

Conflict, though, is everywhere, to the extent that it's nearly unbelievable that two people can be so incredibly unlucky. The circle of plot seems to be that whenever the author feels things are getting mundane, she throws in another tragedy, or another detail of an already mentioned tragedy which makes it all the more tragic. In other words, there are so many, so often, that they as single events lose their power. Additionally, the characters are ridiculously well-adjusted for having gone through all they've supposedly gone through---I have to think that Niffenegger may have been worried about the chronology and plotting of time here, but she wasn't worried about the believability of the characters or the psychology of the events and characters as presented.

I should say, I'm not opposed to tragedy, or to dark books. However, when a book is written simply to be a tear-jerker, when I feel the author is simply playing darkly with her characters and with my emotions for the heck of it as opposed to for the story, and when I feel that the tragedies separately serve no purpose, I see no purpose for the book. An author should be true to the story they create, not their own whims of destruction.

Life is too short to read a book who's sole value is painting many tragedies without tangible enough happiness to balance Anything, let alone the book. Someone might argue that the true love pictured in the book balances the sadness out, but since the author neglects to show us where that love comes from, or even how its arisen, it's difficult to find it a believable love as opposed to something that simply has to be there for the story, and so, is. I'm not sure, honestly, where all the hype came from on this book; I simply found it maudlin and depressing for the last three-hundred pages, not to mention predictable, and the pieces which I was most interested in learning were left out entirely or treated ambiguously and briefly. Certainly, the author started with a wonderful idea, but I have to say that in my opinion, she didn't do a worthwhile job with it--she simply got it done, and sold.

I don't recommend it--to anyone, and I won't be wasting my time with this author in the future.
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LibraryThing member lostcheerio
For the first 250 pages of this book, I was wondering, so what?

The author seemed content to play with the idea of time travelling, let us know how and when it works in this book, fill in the landscape of the place and the characters, and just let the novelty of the concept pull us along. The
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characters, they are so sensitive, so learned, so eloquent. The scenery, it is so hip, so rich, so Chicago. And who doesn't love time travel? Especially when you don't have all those annoying scifi considerations like logic. Sure, the character can meet himself in the past. No, he doesn't change the outcome of his own life, except in small, poignant ways. Everything is convenient, this is literature, not science fiction, it doesn't have to jive like it would in a Ray Bradbury story. Time travel is so interesting, when it doesn't have to make sense. Surely that would be reason enough to keep turning pages.

Apparently, it was. But I was waiting for the engine to engage, waiting for the coconut husks to go up in a blaze, waiting for myself to start to care. There were three things that bothered me in this beginning half of the book. First, I was unable to fully digest the fact that he was visiting his wife as a six-year-old. That is, she was six. He was thirty-eight. He held her on his lap. That was weird for me. Second, there was a glancing mention that whenever he met up with himself in the past and had a spare moment, he was... somehow masturbating? With himself? Or something? It was just a suggestion, and nothing was ever shown, but it was a haunting one. Third, the suffocating elitism of the characters, their artiness, their social status, it was all so precious. As if, of course, these characters are worth caring about -- look at their travails -- and they read Borges for pleasure! Naturally they, they, these beautiful souls, must feel things more exquisitely and tragically than the rest of us fools. Imagine if time travel had been wasted on a troglodyte like me. I might not have put it in the proper literary context, given my lack of ability with French.

Then, I think it was on page 259 of my paperback, the engine engaged. 1. Henry has never come back to the past from beyond the age of forty-three. (What happens at 43? Does he die or is he cured?) 2. Henry has to stay in one place long enough to get through a wedding ceremony without blinking out of his clothes. (He can't control the time travel and he arrives naked returns naked. He leaves little piles of clothes behind him. Stress seems to activate it.) 3. Henry and Clare want to have a child. (Will they be able to? Will it be a time traveler?)

Everything after that was much much more interesting. And at the end of the book, I was very moved. And very invested. And all that stuff. After it was over, I found myself missing Henry and Clare, with all their intellectual nonsense, and all their tragedy. I moved on to another book, but I would have happily read this one for 500 more pages.

Niffenegger invented a new reason to be sad in a relationship. And illustrated it beautifully. In some ways, I guess you could say that this time traveling, meeting up in different stages of life, coming and going, sometimes synchronizing and sometimes missing each other entirely, is a metaphor for all relationships and the ups and downs thereof, but I'd rather see it as something entirely other, with different rules, different reactions. Something I could never experience. I really respect Niffenegger's bravery in tackling this complete mess of material, and her competence in organizing it into an accesible narrative. Makes me feel shame for being baffled by my much-less-complicated novel. It will be interesting to see what she tackles next.
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LibraryThing member chocopainaulat
I enjoyed the first 200 or so pages, reading with an open heart and open mind. Then we hit a part where it just felt like padding. Why recount the goings on of It's A Wonderful Life whilst the characters are watching it on TV?? Is the author boasting that she has seen the film and knows it
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intimately?? Why list all the punk bands, books on shelves....."oh look at me I'm writing a book and I'm so cultured". Why list every pool ball in order of being played. 3 times.The finer details of paper making. After that I was irritated. Clumsy attempts at symbolism. Repetitive repetitive repetitive. Yes you are cold, it is cold, they are cold, yes the coffee drips, it drips, OK IT DRIPS! The ending was made obvious from wherever it was first alluded to in the book. There was a lot of unnecessary descriptions used to try to flesh the story out, whereas other parts were completely underplayed. Characterisation for example. Who are these people? I never really got the sense of any of the peripheral characters. What was up with Ingrid?? That was just bizarre. Disappointing.Underwhelming. Can I have my time back please?
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LibraryThing member brainella
I disliked this book from beginning to end. It was highly recommended to me by several people -- I suppose because I'm a librarian. Just because the main character is a librarian does not mean I would be interested. There is nothing linking the Henry to libraries except that he works in one. I
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found Henry and Claire both annoying, self-centered and hard to like. Gomez is awful, and the whole premise is silly. The book is disjointed and hard to follow at times, and I do not buy the neverending love thing. Bah. Sorry, but if I could give it a negative rating I would. To each his own!
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LibraryThing member blank-ette
--- possible spoilers within my review ---

To say I was underwhelmed with this book wouldn't begin to describe how I feel about it. I was really looking forward to it after reading rave reviews and having a few different people recommend it to me. Can I go back in time, to a point before I read this
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book?

Without going into too much detail, I felt incredibly disturbed by the relationship between Henry and Clare and not only when she was a child. But when she was a child, something felt inherently disturbing about a middle-aged man appearing naked for years in front of a little girl, in secret, and telling her about how he loves her and she will marry him ; talking about how he has to resist having sex with her. I don't care if they were married in the future or not, it was inappropriate. I also, as another reviewer mentioned, found myself wondering if Clare really loved Henry or if she thought she was supposed to because he told her that they were in love and married in the future. He told her so much about the future that it's hard to say what she chose to do or what she did for fear of altering that future.

I take issue with the descriptions of the sex scenes. It's as if the author was trying to see how many times she could get away with saying "co*k", "f*ck" or "cl*t" without her editor wagging her finger. It seemed juvenile and overdone, just like when a kid learns a bad word and can't stop repeating it. It also seemed like all they did for a good part of the book was have sex or talk about having sex. Substance, please? Surely a time traveler has more interesting adventures...

There were many points of the book where I felt the author was also trying to prove how cool and above it all she was. She made the main characters annoying hipsters who talked whenever they could about how smart and cool they were while trying to make it seem like everyone else was just posing and pathetic. Yes, we get it. Henry likes punk. Clare is an Avant-garde artist. They don't like yuppies, even though they live like them in many ways. They can speak French. They like poetry. They read "thinker" books. Henry speaks German, too. Do we need to hear about it every page? Is the author trying to compensate for insecurities or are the characters?

Overall an incredibly disappointing book. The only reason I finished it was to see how Henry finally died.
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LibraryThing member Lman
It has taken me nearly two years after purchasing this book to eventually read it, though I am not sure why I did this; after reading it I am even more unsure. Having said that, I can definitely recommend this book, it was not at all what I had expected, and I suggest that the reader perseveres
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even if, at the beginning, it seems slow and ponderous.

The story is a classic love tale between Clare and Henry with a twist. Due to Henry's abnormal DNA he can dislocate in time - a premise written such that it is plausible, believable, and mysterious enough to keep you wishing to find out what will happen. The characters of Henry and Clare are only fleshed out with these meetings, together at different ages and in different 'whens', and within the flow of their relationship together.

And the plot of this whole book is also dependent on the flow of this relationship, a journey from the beginning until the last page.

This journey, thus, becomes an illustration of the fickleness of time, the inevitability of events as it passes, and emphasises the roller-coaster ride of emotions that is life - especially in extremes. Emotionally uplifting as much as emotionally draining - on finishing, this book left me pondering the vagaries of human actions while feeling both despondent and elated at the same time. Worth it!
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LibraryThing member innominate
A good idea, pushed too far.

The Good: The basic conceit of The Time Traveller's Wife is an interesting one. For the most part the author deals well with the demands placed on her to maintain suspense while it is clear that at least one character in the book must know how it ends. The writing itself
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is predominantly deftly managed, and the reader's attention is well-held (the sequence of events around the Christmas visit caused me to miss my stop on the train home, I was so engrossed).

The Not-So-Good: Once finished, it is too clear that this is a first novel -- it reeks of the creative writing class. A number of the episodes did not serve a clear purpose, apart from padding the story out. Also (unfortunately) it is very difficult to empathise with a time-travelling character. I finished the book with a sense of relief, which is an unfortunate emotion.

I would recommend you to read this book, and to look out for future works by the same author. If you can, borrow it from someone (or a library), or find a second-hand copy, rather than buying your own.
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LibraryThing member Bookstacks
The Time Traveller’s Wife
By Audrey Niffenegger

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Not only is it an extraordinary story, it is also beautifully written and well paced.
It is the love story between a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to jump through time randomly and a girl he
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meets at various stages in her life. It is hard to put into a genre; if I had been given the impression it’s a romance I probably wouldn’t have read it, if I thought it was sci-fi that may have coloured the story too much looking for the ‘science’, for answers. It does deal with the problems that arise with time travel, the paradoxes etc but not to a distracting degree, just enough to be fascinating.
I started the book barely knowing a thing about it and cried when it ended simply because I didn’t want it too. I envy anyone who hasn’t read it yet because they get to read it for the first time.
And you know what else? I’ve only just ‘got’ the cover. Fantastic.
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LibraryThing member Laurenbdavis
The premise of this book is intriguing, but alas, the execution is prosaic. Although curious about the plotting, by the time I was halfway through it felt contrived, and I cared very little for the characters. I fear the author opted for cleverness rather than insight into the longing of the heart.
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I don't know how old the author is, but if she is young perhaps she will mature into human understanding. Experience sometimes rewards talent in that way. This effort, however was disappointing.
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LibraryThing member Carmenere
Although this book title implies that the wife, Clare, is the central character in this novel it is actually husband, Henry, who steals the show.....and clothes and whatever else he may need when he unintentionally travels through time and space.
I found Niffeneggers' characters to be well defined
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and memorable even when they make brief appearances, Ben, Richard, Lucille and Annette become 3 dimensional although they are bit players. In fact Annette is never actually alive in the story yet her presence is well received.
The author should receive an award for creative writing. How she ever kept track of all of the dates, ages of characters and events in non-chronological order is a feat in itself and I commend her for it.
It is a lengthy book and by page 380 I realized that time travel is a tedious thing and I was ready for the book to come to its conclusion. Perhaps the same feeling Henry exhibited.
I highly recommend this read, it is fresh, humorous, interesting and at times emotional. I just don't see how Niffenegger can top this one but I will certainly await her next book. In fact, I don't see how the movie can top the book but I plan on seeing it eventually.
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LibraryThing member paghababian
This was a captivating story about what it means to wait for something. Henry is a time traveler, but not in some hokey sci-fi way - he has a genetic mutation that just lets him slip around in time (very Billy Pilgrim, but less psychedelic). He first meets his future wife Clare when he's in his
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twenties, but she first met him 15 years earlier during one of his time travels.

The story alternates between Henry and Clare's POV, sometimes looking at the same event through both sets of eyes. As the story unfolds, the reader gets to experience events from different moments in time, via Henry in the past, present, and future. It sounds confusing, but all of this is handled very well by Niffenegger, who manages to keep the story bound within itself.

What really hit home for me was the theme of waiting - we're all waiting for something, albeit not in the same way that Clare is. Waiting is hard, it hurts, sometimes it's all you can think about, but we keep waiting. There's always something else to wait for, and it can try our patience. This book shows, though, that the waiting can be a very important part of getting whatever it is you're waiting for.
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LibraryThing member dw0rd
Intriguing but overly sentimental at times. Worked for me if I didn't think about it too much. Listening to the story while I did housework and other low intensity tasks was a pleasure. If I tried to figure out some of the whys and hows or thought about some of the more bizarre situations, I liked
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it less and less, so I stopped thinking about it and just listened.Afterward, I couldn't just leave it alone and had to think about it. I couldn't rationalize or accept some of the strange scenes. Worse, when I consulted a hard copy for explanations, I discovered I'd been listening to an abridgement! I hate that. Now I need to start over to fill in the gaps.Or maybe I won't. I got the concept and enjoyed the reading. If I do it again, the weird parts will demand attention: Henry commandeering Clare's entire life. Young Clare talking with naked old Henry. Old Henry teaching young Henry to steal. Doctors smoking. Horrid death scenes. Then the non sequiturs will demand investigation: Time travel is proven but nobody gets badgered by the media? It's a genetic done deal with no intermediate adaptations? So many Henrys see his mother's death, wouldn't their combined mass blunt the car's impact? If they all showed up in the same space wouldn't there be a large explosion or at least a bloody mess? Maybe the unabridged version will clear things up or maybe I'll quit while I'm ahead.
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LibraryThing member LukeS
"The Time Traveler's Wife" is a sweet, sweeping, unique love story. Ms. Niffenegger gives us Henry, who travels around in time, and the absolute love of his life, Clare. This courtship is a quirky, mixed-up-in-time roller coaster in which Henry travels back in time and meets Clare when she's a
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little girl. This visitation happens several times, and Clare, little darling that she is, learns to bring clothes out for this man who meets her in her back yard, yet must hide in the bushes because he always loses his clothes in time travel.

Henry bounces around, to say the least, but the one constant in his life is Clare, who, even as a little girl, starts Henry on the straight and narrow path to righteous spousehood. This is an extremely imaginative way of establishing the timeless nature of love; Henry's dedication survives him, clearly.

The praise this wonderful novel has received has all been deserved. It is a very memorable read, the characters and events will stay with you, to your delight. Don't delay any longer if you haven't read it yet.
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LibraryThing member sturlington
Henry and Clare have been together, in one way or another, all their lives. That’s because Henry is a time traveler, an ability that is out of his control, and he tends to hop around at various points in past and future to see the people who are most important to him. So an older Henry starts
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visiting his future wife, Clare, when she is only 6 years old. By the time she meets him “for real,” in the present timeline, she has loved him for years, while he is only meeting her for the first time.

A story about time travel done well is a difficult thing to write, and this is one done well. Despite the non-linear story and overlapping timelines — even the scenes when Henry appears with himself at different ages — the reader never feels lost. The structure of the novel unfolds and then folds again quite neatly, bookended by young and old Clare, always waiting for Henry to appear out of time.

Ultimately, this is a tragic romance, mainly because of the Henry’s predestined death. But even more than that, the story is tragic because Henry appears to have no choices, no free will, in his life. Because he has already experienced what will happen, he has no power to change it — it has happened to him, even if it happened in the future. He has no control over his own life. Which raises the question of whether Clare has choices too, such as the choice to move on after Henry has gone, or whether she is predestined to wait her whole life for him to appear one more time.
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LibraryThing member corglacier7
I just can't get behind all the praise for "Time Traveler's Wife". The prose felt weighty and ponderous and somewhat pretentious, and to me, there was just something vaguely disturbing about Henry and Claire's relationship...the whole aspect of a middle-aged Henry telling a child Claire that
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they'll be together, and her growing up with him as her sole love interest and "Prince Charming" is sort of disturbing. Does she actually choose to love him? From how she hunts him down as an adult, it seems more like she's just taking him as a lover because she believes it's her "destiny". She never even attempts, or considers, a different path. The whole thing feels like a massive moebius strip/moral dilemma, and taking the free will out of their love takes a lot of the magic out of it as well. This is all even before the sheer weirdness of Claire getting impregnated through a bizarre, nonsensical plot device, at which point I pretty much had to force myself to finish this book in hopes of finding something redeeming. By making them both mere drones to some predestined fate, I found neither Claire nor Henry to be particularly engaging or likable characters, and frankly didn't much care what happened to them.
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LibraryThing member sarah-e
I greatly enjoyed this book. I did not really know what to expect, and I was pleased that it was so much more complex than a simple love story. Some of the time-travel theory (for lack of a better word) was hard for me to wrap my head around, but that became my favorite aspect of the book. The
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story deals with permanence and existence in a different way than I have experienced it or read about it before, and the weight of that stayed with me for a long time.

The love story is an important part of the book, and it was fun to see how the main characters’ lives weave around one another’s and even through their own. I can see how this made such a hit movie. I have not seen the movie because I am afraid they will have focused on elements that were, to me, less important.
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LibraryThing member myfanwy
This is without a doubt the most cannot-put-down book I've read this year. (And don't kid me about 2007 only being a week old -- I mean the last 12-month!) There are other books I've read with greater grandeur such as East of Eden but this struck me like no other and I read voraciously over just a
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few days.

The Time Traveler's Wife is the story of a relationship between two people, told from both of their points of view. It just so happens that one of them is a time traveler and the other is not. Niffenegger wisely sidesteps the issue of how this occurs. She is meticulous in tracking the encounters between these two, both those where he is out of his own time (visiting his future wife in her girlhood) and the time they spend together. I kept waiting for a misstep which never happened. Incredibly, the author also manages to have each character mature over the course of the book, interacting at the appropriate maturity during each encounter no matter how close together in "real" time.

One of the many remarkable things about this book is that the relationship they have is so romantic without being the least romanticized. It is a romance borne of waking up together, drinking coffee on a Sunday morning, and sharing the joys and griefs of shared Christmases, deaths and births in the family. Their lives are hardly out of the ordinary in many senses, and yet the sense of hope countered by the inherent determinism of time travel gives them a tragic romance.

I also found myself again and again in the book. I became deeply nostalgic for Chicago: seeing the butterfly exhibit at the Field Museum for the first time, the joy of growing up among thousands of books, characters going to work at the Symphony, the Art Institute, the view from the El, eating ethnic food downtown, watching an opera for the first time at the Chicago Opera House, the bitter bitter cold, and of course the magical Lake. There is such grandeur in that city, more so than any place I've been with the possible exception of New York. The book even has all the ethnic groups I grew up with; the Poles, the Koreans, the Swedes. It was like reading a life I could have led had I stayed in Chicago.

But there was so much more that appealed to me. The characters in TTTW are people I genuinely like and just a few years my senior. You can see them in all of their virtues and flaws. The dialogue is wonderfully written and nothing if not realistic. A major climactic scene occurs on New Year's Eve 2006/2007, the night I borrowed the book (and long after it was published). How could I not be rapt?

My eyes welled with tears at the end. This is a book I need to own and lend. I will stop here before I give away any more. No description can do this book proper justice.
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LibraryThing member slushypipp
I received this book from a good friend of mine who declared that this is what love ought to be, and while I might not trust her intuitions about love, I generally trust her intuitions about literature. She is, after all, a professor of literature.

When I told her I was reading it, my coworker
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informed me that it was the best book she had read all year.

While I was impressed with the metaphysical consistency of a book about time travel, that's hardly something to recommend a book.

I've seen glowing reviews regarding the detail to which Chicago is described. It's true that there's quite a lot of description of Chicago, but it's hardly detail. In one section, for instance, the author allows Henry to visit his father. He takes the El, then changes two streets to find himself at the home of his youth. Growing up, Henry must have taken that route hundreds of times, and one gets the impression he hasn't traveled it in years. Yet, instead of giving a vivid portait of his current anxiety brought on by the familiar clank of the El or the odor of the neighborhood, Niffenegger only allows Henry to give us directions not disimilar to the kind one might find on the Chicago Metro Authority website.

Similarly with music: Henry and Clare have an affection for punk and rock music, but the author indulges in rattling off bands and lyrics rather than creating a rich setting with the soundtrack. With this she seems to provide the characters with no more depth than one typically sees on a Myspace.com profile.

The novel is told in two characters' voices, as in, for example, Talking It Over. But the narration is disappointingly indistinct; their voices are largely indistinguishable and neither of them have exceptional philosophical insight or reflection regarding their circumstances.

The most disappointing part of this novel, however, is the unfulfilling and somewhat bland portrait of love. When Henry confesses his womanizing past, he reminds Clare that not everyone has met his/her soulmate at age 6.

Because Henry can visit himself in the future and because, as she is growing up, Henry is able to tell Clare that they are married in some future life, there is no anxiety of love. It lacks fragility and uncertainty. It lacks the epiphany and realization of one's affections and true heart and replaces it instead with one somewhat unsatisfactory moment of anxiety for Clare when she comes to realize that her eternal love, a future version of whom she has known intermittently all her life, may not be a sterling gentleman in the present-day reality.

And, like Clare and Henry, we the readers take their love and marriage as complete, just as we should, since it is, after all, a completed novel. There is little reason or even beauty in their undying passion and love; as Clare and Henry accept it as having already happened, so do we. Like either Clare or Henry, we do not need to fall in love with them to believe them to be lovable or in love.

There are throughout particularly touching scenes and well-written passages. The scene that follows the mapquest directions to Henry's father's apartment, for instance, is a compassionate and angry confrontation between Henry and his depressed and destroyed alcoholic father. His father, a violinist, starting drinking soon after his wife died in a car accident and has given himself irreparable nerve damage 27 years later, which cause tremors. He cannot work. And, what's more, he's offended by his son's assertion that his dead mother would be profoundly disappointed in his father's depression, as she died when he was only five. Henry is able to tell him that he has, as an adult, spent much time with his mother during the time when she was very much alive: he is able to be a much-needed witness to his mother's happiness and his parents' deeply happy marriage.

There is magic in Henry's tale of meeting his younger self, a child of perhaps five, at the Natural History Museum in the middle of the night, both of them time-travelling, and taking him on a private tour of those things that he knows his younger self loves. And there is magic in the secret of older Henry visiting his future wife, Clare, while she is still a child. It is so magical, in fact, that it almost obscures the fact that he is an older man teaching a child how to love him, that he is, in some ways, training her to be his some-day wife.
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LibraryThing member ohdani
*Spoilers*

The premise of this story was so interesting, and I think it was written incredibly well. Considering all the jumping around in time, it unfolds beautifully and holds interest.

That being said, something about the whole story bothers me. I can't really pinpoint it. Being a fan of science
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fiction and fantasy, I have no problem stretching the imagination to believe in things in books. I think the time-traveling aspect of the book was actually the most believable part. The romance between Henry and Clare was strange... and I think that's the aspect that I have a problem with.

I actually feel bad for Clare. She spends her whole childhood with this adult version of Henry visiting her and hanging out with her. People in her school think there's something wrong with her or that she's a lesbian because she refuses to date other boys her age. Aside from that, she only gets to see him occasionally and sometimes the wait spans months or years. Also... he's decades her senior in these moments and even though it's his future wife, he's courting a child version of her. He doesn't INTEND it to be that way, but the entire time I kept thinking that their meetings just added to the 'romance' of the book and then was weirded out because she was underage. On her 18th birthday he makes to love her, and he's still way older, having just left the adult version of this woman at home in her time waiting for him. Creepy?

When Clare finally meets up with 'real' Henry there's an immediate connection although this Henry has no idea who she is. He's never met her, but she has all these memories of wonderful times of bonding. So she sort of has to start over with him completely. Of course, she's just happy to see him again and finally have the 'real' version of him, but now instead of anxiously awaiting him to appear she's worried sick when he disappears on her. And when there is any stress in his life, she has to deal with him popping out of time. I can't really say for sure, but I find it hard to believe that any woman could be so nonchalant about her present husband disappearing on her wedding day, only to be saved by a future version of him showing up to take his place (aside from the fact that I find it hard to believe that no one but Clare noticed this man she was marrying was a decade older than the one who was around an hour ago). I get it, wedding day nerves, but really? And she sort of chortled good-naturedly about "oh that crazy time-traveling henry" but I really think I'd be a little peeved. The whole idea of it bothers me.

And then Henry is killed, and Clare is left alone and depressed. She finds a letter Henry left for her, telling her that he has seen her one more time as an old woman. He describes the scene in detail. So she seems to spend the rest of her adult life, more than 40 years, once again waiting for Henry's reappearance. A week before He finally arrives, she's sitting exactly as he described in the letter, wearing the same sweater, thinking that she will be ready for him when he arrives. It's another week before he does. So how often does she set this scene up just hoping he'll show up? He says he wanted her to be free, but by telling her all of this it seems she's was more trapped than ever before.

Also, I find it hard to believe that so many people would be accepting of this time-traveling thing without the entire world being notified. If a car's tire's being slashed makes nighttime news, I really can't fathom how knowledge of a genuine time-traveler wouldn't SOMEHOW get leaked out to the public. Henry wouldn't lead a normal life as he does.

I think if the romance and normalcy of the book was removed and somehow the time-traveling aspect remained, the book would be better.
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LibraryThing member rainbowdarling
I should state from the outset that I have a terrible time believing in time travel. This was a book club pick, and as it was our first one, I read it so as to participate with the group. I would not otherwise have picked it up for myself.

That said, the book was okay. It wasn't bad, but I couldn't
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say it was good, either. The main character, Henry, was aggravating at times, though on the whole just non-offensive. Clare, who I think is supposed to actually be the main character, pales in the background. She never seems to come out as a character who is a strong driving factor in the book. I get the idea that any female counterpart would have done in the story, which is not how a story should work.

The time travel elements were good. If ever there was a way to actually have time travel work in a story, this was it. It was the most believable fabrication of time travel that I've ever encountered (which hasn't swayed my lack of belief in it one iota).

The book was just okay. It was nothing special but neither was it terrible writing - not by a long shot. Niffenegger has an interesting voice in her writing. I just couldn't get into it.
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LibraryThing member weeta
This book is prolonged case of Waiting for Something to Happen (and waiting for Clare to become a fully developed character instead of Henry's accessory) The idea is great, but the story is painfully underdeveloped.
LibraryThing member pallavi11
I had to come home so I wanted a book to read on the train. I went to Janpath, an got this one from a little street bookshop. When I had set out to acquire a book, I had planned to buy both this one and AS Byatt's Possession, so when I got out of this little shop, I went up Janpath, and crossed
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over and walked down the road, and on a whim, went inside Cafe Coffee Day.

And this is a book you should read alone in a coffee shop, a plate of Chocolate Truffle in front of you. And as you tuck in the rich chocolate, and look forward to going home, you can savour dialouge such as*

I gave her my heart to keep, in case I lose it again.

Home is where my heart is. But my heart is here. I am home

If books had flavours, this one would be chocolate truffle, rich, chocolatey, comforting. Not like being home, which is somewhere between mildly boring and extremely annoying, but like coming home. Like first love, like memories of childhood, not like happiness, but like the promise of happiness, like a lovely dream which breaks your heart when you wake up.

But holding an actual book in your hand, the coarse pages of good quality recyclable paper, and the way they smell, sitting in an empty coffeeshop, walking down the road, lost to the world, in dreams which are both too silly and too pretty, being a teenaged girl again... there are times when you can believe in the dreams of your childhood, and there are times which are simply the best time you ever had.

And no, I won't recommend this, or mine, teenaged imagination to anyone, but this is the book I will end up writing if I was a writer. Because I too am unable to see the ugliness of suffering, the boringness of waiting. I too am young enough to believe that someone will wait from the age of 36 to 82, for one glimpse of her first love. Well I would like to believe that last one, I really would.

And this is the last illusion left, I still believe in true love. And the day I get married, I will have to give up o it, and then I will have nothing left to believe, nothing at all.
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LibraryThing member magemanda
This book is an amazing triumph, an original retelling of the 'boy meets girl' tale, and is thoroughly gripping from start to finish. Henry DeTamble firsts meets Clare Abshire when he is thirty six and she is six. Henry is a time traveller - a person with a rare genetic disorder that leads him to
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vanish from one time in his life and appear in another. He has met his dead mother, his own child before her birth, his future bride when she is just wearing pigtails. He has met himself on numerous occasions - even, in a both amusing and rather odd situation, experimented with himself.

The book is told from both Henry and Clare's viewpoints, with a handy title at the head of each passage which gives the year and the respective ages of the two protagonists. My one slight complaint is that, at times, their 'voices' were too similar and so I had to check which viewpoint I was reading if there was no immediate clue.

The joy in this book is in watching Clare and Henry's courtship, which takes place in a non-linear fashion through the whole of their lives. Their two weddings are both beautiful and poignant, since we know that Clare misses out on marrying the young Henry in her present the first time round so has a very private ceremony with him to ensure she is 'very married'.

The novel has almost two halves - the first unfolds slowly as we flit backwards and forwards in time learning about both Clare and Henry, and the various times they have met. We also meet the secondary characters, some of whom are absolutely delightful and none of whom are one-dimensional. There are ghostly echoes of bad times to come.

In the second half of the book we deal with the bad times. There is heartbreak aplenty and the story brought me to tears a number of times. The grace of Clare as she deals with miscarriage after miscarriage, having quiet faith that she will eventually have a child, is desperately sad and hopeful at the same time. Henry's realisation of his own demise comes partway through the book and foreshadows every glorious day they have left.

We were able to share the feelings of both during those times that Henry was absent - Clare's longing for his return, and her constant wondering about what he did and where he was; Henry's confusion and displacement. At times in his youth Henry was a person hard to like - as he stole and burgled - but his desperation at his fairly unique situation caused me to feel great pity for him.

This book was exceptionally written, sharp with black humour and warm with love. Niffenegger has taken a bizarre and surreal concept, and spun it into both a beautiful love story and a treatise on determinism. Philosophical musings and discussions on morality take place, amongst gestures of romance and sympathy for Baby Punks.

I was hard put to stop reading once I'd started - the short passages and lack of chapters invite you to read on and on until the whole novel is consumed. I think this will take its place as a classic, and would recommend it without hesitation.
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Pages

546

ISBN

0224072374 / 9780224072373
Page: 5.169 seconds