The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger ISBN 978-0156029438 – Read by William Hope (Reader), Laurel Lefkow (Reader)
Have you ever listened to a book which was a little confusing in audio but thought that if read from a page would have made much more sense? I do not know about anyone else but this book fell into that category for me. I really enjoyed the book and the lovely twists and turns and back and forth; the idea of love that transcends time and place. Maybe my confusion was something that every reader felt, but I believe that this is one book to be read.
cover art from The Time Traveler’s Wife
Each chapter opens with a time date and age of Henry and Clare. The audio book has two readers – one reads Henry perspectives and the other reads Clare’s. They are excellent readers and my complaint has nothing to do with the readers, but unless you have an eidetic memory, very few people as they are driving down the road can remember “Christmas Eve 1991 (Clare is 20, Henry is 28)”
Henry has a condition. With no control or planning he will all of a sudden leap from this life into a scene from the past, usually a scene with great emotion. He has seen the car crash where his mother died on any number of occasions, he goes back to when he meets Clare for the first time. As he ages, the condition is worsening and he has less and less control. He has found a doctor who is trying to help and found a friend who concocts drug combinations to try and help him stay in one place; but there comes a point when nothing helps.
Clare is a studio artist and Henry is a librarian in a special collection. A fitting occupation for one who travels through time.
Henry takes nothing from one time to another and arrives naked. So he has had to adapt — find clothes quickly, be able to pick locks and has a loose moral code to allow himself to survive. Though I may not agree with theft, I might think otherwise if I continually ended up in a strange place in winter with lots of snow on the ground.
This is first and foremost a love story. Henry and Clare are truly an amazing couple. Yet this is also a story of fantasy and the magical “what-if”.
I would highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys literature with a hint of romance and fantasy. It is a very well written work with some great characters.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This highly original first novel won the largest advance San Francisco-based MacAdam/Cage had ever paid, and it was money well spent. Niffenegger has written a soaring love story illuminated by dozens of finely observed details and scenes, and one that skates nimbly around a huge conundrum at the heart of the book: Henry De Tamble, a rather dashing librarian at the famous Newberry Library in Chicago, finds himself unavoidably whisked around in time. He disappears from a scene in, say, 1998 to find himself suddenly, usually without his clothes, which mysteriously disappear in transit, at an entirely different place 10 years earlier-or later. During one of these migrations, he drops in on beautiful teenage Clare Abshire, an heiress in a large house on the nearby Michigan peninsula, and a lifelong passion is born. The problem is that while Henry’s age darts back and forth according to his location in time, Clare’s moves forward in the normal manner, so the pair are often out of sync. But such is the author’s tenderness with the characters, and the determinedly ungimmicky way in which she writes of their predicament […] that the book is much more love story than fantasy. It also has a splendidly drawn cast, from Henry’s violinist father […] to Clare’s odd family and a multitude of Chicago bohemian friends. […] It is a fair tribute to her skill and sensibility to say that the book leaves a reader with an impression of life’s riches and strangeness rather than of easy thrills.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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