Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife

[Peder]

Originally Posted by westylass

I'm such a sap

Oh Westy,
Please don't say that, or even think it. In my book, empathy is a fine emotion to have, and the fact that the author carried you (and me) along to such an extent speaks well of her abilities. Even if we are having trouble here putting our finger on exactly what those abilities are.
Peder

[Miss Shelf]

Originally Posted by Peder

Ms Shelf,
Um, yes, and yes. No particular arguments there. I was curious why, with two characters like that, there was so mild a reaction in this thread compared to Shade's and let's say yours. Or maybe the reaction wasn't so mild and I am simpy projecting my own mild personal reaction beyond proper limts.

Maybe I'll count the vote,
and find out I'm wrong.
Wouldn't be the first time
Peder

Maybe there was a mild reaction because the book doesn't polarize readers the way some books do-"either you love ir or you hate it"? It's relatively inoffensive, and perhaps because the characters behave in human ways that people can identify with. I don't hate the book, I just don't see it as a love story the way I interpret love to be.

[Peder]

Originally Posted by Miss Shelf

I just don't see it as a love story the way I interpret love to be.

Ms Shelf,
Interesting point that I hadn't thought of. It may be yet another example of the way the author has given the story a one-step remove from exact or at least believable reality. Shade has already observed that the characters of Clare and Henry have the same voice and one often can't tell who is narrating. I would say that was another step in that same drection of the characters being not quite real, whether the author intended it or not. Maybe she can't write convincing characters. I'm not sure how to describe that unreal aspect of the book. I have used the term fairy-tale-like, but the book certainly isn't a fairy tale either. So I don't know what the word is for that strange quality that this book has. Of course one might simply say 'badly written,' but I am not quite ready to yield the point so easily.

Or maybe this is simply a missed attempt at something that could have been better.

Peder

[lies]

Originally Posted by Peder

Or maybe this is simply a missed attempt at something that could have been better.

I would think that's the case too.

[Prairie_Girl]

Well, I really liked it. It's a very quick read, though I will admit that after I found out Henry dies when Alba's five I did kind of feel a bit of "get on with it". But I thought the idea of unique and the love story quite beautiful. alsoliked the way they handled Clare's miscarriages

[westylass]

Originally Posted by Peder

Oh Westy,
Please don't say that, or even think it. In my book, empathy is a fine emotion to have, and the fact that the author carried you (and me) along to such an extent speaks well of her abilities. Even if we are having trouble here putting our finger on exactly what those abilities are.
Peder

Thanks Pedar. I thought for her first book (at least I'm pretty sure it is) it was fantastic.

[chop_chop]

Sorry if there has already been some post about this book - I did have a look but couldn't seem to find anything.

I am over half way through this book and I think it is lovely. It is quite unlike anything I have read before - and while at first the jumpy narrative was a bit confusing (it is helpful to have the chapter headings - well actually I think it would be impossible without them) I have got used to it now and I am just enjoying the story, seeing where all the ends tie up etc.

I was just wondering if anyone else has read this book and what they thought of it - without giving the ending away!

[Erica]

Originally Posted by chop_chop

Sorry if there has already been some post about this book - I did have a look but couldn't seem to find anything.

I am over half way through this book and I think it is lovely. It is quite unlike anything I have read before - and while at first the jumpy narrative was a bit confusing (it is helpful to have the chapter headings - well actually I think it would be impossible without them) I have got used to it now and I am just enjoying the story, seeing where all the ends tie up etc.


I was just wondering if anyone else has read this book and what they thought of it - without giving the ending away!

I loved it...

Did you know there is a reading guide out for this book now?
'The Time Traveler's Wife' (Reading Guide Edition)
Audrey Niffenegger ...Paperback - September 1st 2005
Link below!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...101158-7831837

She also has another book out! (Don't know what its like though)

'The Three Incestuous Sisters ' ~Audrey Niffenegger

Jonathan Cape
Hardcover - September 1st 2005
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...101158-7831837

[Prairie_Girl]

I loved it too, I read it in a day, and was completely immersed in it. It stayed with me for a few days afterward. It took me longer to read the last 150 pages than the rest of the book because I didn't want it to end. Though, I felt cheated because i wanted Henry to give his wife permission to move on after his death. I found like she lost the rest of her life, waiting for him to come back

[chop_chop]

Originally Posted by Erica

I loved it...

Did you know there is a reading guide out for this book now?
'The Time Traveler's Wife' (Reading Guide Edition)
Audrey Niffenegger ...Paperback - September 1st 2005
Link below!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...101158-7831837

She also has another book out! (Don't know what its like though)

'The Three Incestuous Sisters ' ~Audrey Niffenegger

Jonathan Cape
Hardcover - September 1st 2005
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...101158-7831837

Her new book sounds very interesting - I will see if I can get a copy from the library to have a look at.

I will post another message when I have finished the book - then I can have a proper talk about it with those of you who missed the first thread. I don't know why I couldn'd find it though - not looking in the right places perhaps.
:o

[Prairie_Girl]

there's been some confusion about whether travel(l)er has one L or two. you proably searched with one, and that thread has two.

[GeoffNelder]

The time travel theme has fascinated me since HG Wells onwards. Exploration of the TT paradox makes excellent intelligent fiction as well as non-fiction. But this book explores none of this, probably wisely. Nevertheless, we cannot but be intrigued by the premise of a man carrying a chrono-mutated gene such that he suddenly finds himself naked in his current body-age but in anywhen give or take 50 years, and anywhere. Actually the anywhere tends to be in places he works, lives (past, present and future), in the street or in the garden of a young girl.
Aspects of this plot worry me. The girl is not freaked out nearly as much as one would expect. Sadly for her the man, Henry manipulates her whole life from six years old, through marriage to him, past his death to when she is in her 80s. He cannot be serous that he has no control over their destinies, or that of others, when he engineers their wealth through lottery and equity predictions. He is also able to change the future as in the experiment changing a signature on a painting. It is a copout not to invoke paradoxes here. And why, sometimes, doesn’t he emerges in a wall, in the air, in someone? Maybe I am too nostalgic for the science logic, but Henry claims not to want to air travel for fear of returning to a place where the airplane was.
I am equally disturbed that the two main characters are not likeable – do we care what happens to them? No. This is partly because of the plot structure device of rapid-switching POV between them. I’m not sure how I would have organised it but the result of this way is that the reader doesn’t build a rapport with either of them.
The whole book depends on an illogicality too. He doesn’t meet, in real time, the woman he often engages with until he is 28, she 20. She remembers him but he doesn’t her. Yet, he can travel back and to, up to 50 years. His going forward must have stumbled over Clare, or the evidence for her. This plot contrivance is ludicrous, sadly, because it has the elements of a rich love story, if only we cared.

There are few very well-written and memorable phrasing. One is where Clare mentions why she has no culinary skills. ‘I walk into the kitchen and I hear this little voice saying, “Go away.” So I do.’

The wedding speech by love/hate friend/enemy Gomez (p267) is very good as is the hilarious whirlwind of TT disappearances on Henry’s wedding day.

Some editing and continuity errors exist in this (and every) book. P376 he’s a CDP should be she.

The premise is not original. After Michael Moorcock’s vast output of TT tales it would be difficult. But an episode of Quantum Leap (TV series 1989 – 1993) had Scott Bakula (Capn Archer in Star Trek, Next Generation)
as Dr Sam Beckett, spontaneously travelled to and fro in time, once, if I remember correctly, to see his future wife as a young girl, and had the dilemma of preventing an accident, but which would bring their timelines together. Preventing the accident could have meant not meeting and so not marrying her later. Also, the premise of an illness inducing time changes is not new. However, very little is any story is brand new, what matters is how this story unfolds and how it is told. There are magic moments, especially for readers unfamiliar with time travel in fiction. There is a love story, albeit with two self-obsessed individuals who make it difficult for the reader to care about them.

Geoff

[WoundedThorns]

i keep seeing the book in my school library, but i also keep putting it off. i dunno, i guess its not really a book that i'm rushing to read, nor spend $14 on. i read amazon.com review about it, and i guess it caught my attention enough

[jaybe]

I hated it. For me it was a romance, I hate romances.

I did finish it though, so I've partly read hundreds which were a lot worse.

The Three Incestuous Sisters, I got that from the library. A hideously expensive picture book. It takes ten minutes to read.

The pictures/drawings I should say, are I suppose a bit in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. And very poor in comparison.

[jaynebosco]

I am considering of buying this book, but I was wondering if anybody on this site would recommend the book. Did you like it? Was it worth the purchase price?

If you could let me know, if it was worth it, without giving away the story/plot, I would really appreciate it.