The Time Traveler's Wife

2003

mutants
love
death
amputation
sex
time
science fiction
romance
foreshadowing
first-person narrative

The story

Audrey Niffenegger's innovative debut, The Time Traveler's Wife, is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity in his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing. ([source][1]) [1]: https://www.audreyniffenegger.com/published-books/2015/4/22/the-time-travelers-wife-2005

What it’s like

Alternating first-person voices give this book the feel of two diaries left open on the same kitchen table: Clare's sensuous, sun-warmed Chicago afternoons in her art studio, paint and cold coffee and the smell of old books, set against Henry's restless, wry dispatches from the wrong decades, where winter streets, unheated rooms and sudden nakedness become a kind of dread-tinged comedy. The prose is conversational, intimate and precise about small domestic objects, with a melancholy that accumulates slowly rather than arriving in a single blow. Scenes move in unhurried chapters that circle back on themselves, so the pleasure lies in noticing how the past keeps surfacing in the present. Intensity runs moderate: some explicit sexual content and frank talk of bodily injury and surgery, a few brief violent or frightening moments, and a steady undercurrent of grief, but no sustained gore. It suits a rainy weekend read, a slow late-night sit, or anyone who loves a love story shaped by loss, time and the ache of waiting.

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