“I'm sorry. I didn't know you were coming or I'd have cleaned up a little more. My life, I mean, not just the apartment.” (Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife)
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| The Time Traveler's Wife |
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneger is a novel about Henry, a time traveler, and his wife Clare. Henry has Chrono-Displacement Disorder. It causes his genetic clock to reset and as a result he travels through time. He gets pulled to moments of emotional gravity. For instance, his mother’s death, his wedding, and so on. After meeting his wife he finds himself travelling to her past, when she was a little girl as young as six years old. He visits her regularly as she is growing up. With every visit he get to know his wife and himself a little better. The story takes a turn for the worse when they find out that if they don’t find a way to stop Henry from time travelling, it will end up killing him.
The story of Henry and Clare is heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. It is amazing how Audrey Niffeneger accomplished to write a story that is so complicated in such a way that it is still easy to follow and it makes perfect sense. She jumped from time to time almost every other paragraph and still everything fit perfectly. Unfortunately, sometimes it fit too perfectly. The story contains some amazing plot twists, but they were often too predictable because of the way the story was told. This did however contribute to the feeling of helplessness, that nothing could be done. The characters knew that there were some horrible events to come, but they couldn’t do anything to stop it from happening. Everything was inevitable and nothing could ever be changed, because everything had already happened somewhere in another time.
I highly recommend this book. It tells a beautiful story and the way it is brought to the reader definitely deserves some appreciation.
P.S.: The movie does the book justice. So, even if you are not going to read it. At least watch the movie.
xx
Jana
