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The Time Traveler's Wife Hardcover – November 22, 2010
- Print length560 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication dateNovember 22, 2010
- Reading age14 years and up
- Dimensions6.25 x 1.5 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100547119798
- ISBN-13978-0547119793
- Lexile measure720L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“An enchanting novel, beautifully crafted and as dazzlingly imaginative as it is dizzyingly romantic.”—SCOTT TUROW
“A powerfully original love story . . . [An] amazing trip.”—PEOPLE
“Niffenegger plays ingeniously in her temporal hall of mirrors.”—THE NEW YORKER
“[This] inventive and poignant writing is well worth a trip.”—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
From the Back Cover
A most untraditional story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love.
One of People magazine's Top Ten Books of the Year
"[A] time-travel love story par excellence. . . . It will be a hard-hearted reader who is not moved to tears by this soaring celebration of the victory of love over time." --Chicago Tribune
Audrey Niffenegger is a professor in the M.F.A. program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. She lives in Chicago. The Time Traveler's Wife is her first novel; her second, Her Fearful Symmetry, takes place next to London's Highgate Cemetery.
About the Author
AUDREY NIFFENEGGER is a writer, professor and visual artist. Her first novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, was an international bestseller that received praise from USA Today, The Washington Post, People Magazine, and The Denver Post, among numerous publications. Niffenegger has received residencies from the Ragdale Foundation and the Corporation of Yaddo, and has also received a Fellowship in Prose from the Illinois Arts Council. She received her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University. Her writing has been published in The Chicago Tribune, Zoetrope, and The London Guardian. Her art is in the collections of the Newberry Library, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Temple University, among others. She lives in Chicago.
Product details
- Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Reprint edition (November 22, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 560 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0547119798
- ISBN-13 : 978-0547119793
- Reading age : 14 years and up
- Lexile measure : 720L
- Item Weight : 1.75 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.25 x 1.5 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,252,385 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,850 in Time Travel Romances
- #50,039 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #151,720 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist and a faculty member at Columbia College in Chicago. In addition to her bestselling debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, she is the author of two illustrated novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress. She lives in Chicago.
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Put aside the movie. I've not seen it but I've received multiple confirmations that it sucked.
Put aside the cover (and it's implications). A young girl in knee high socks and Mary Janes standing next to a pile of men's clothes. The implication being: there's a naked dude running around this little girl. Oh, in the novel there is.
Put aside trying to figure out the intricacies of time travel. Don't discuss it like Star Trek fans trying to figure out and argue with J.J. Abrams resetting of the Star Trek universe. Just enjoy the story.
The Time Traveler's Wife is a romance novel of the `everyone-has-a-soul-mate' variety. Yet the writing his heightened (another word for so, so much better) than your average romance or genre fiction (and most literary fiction) with a time travel twist.
"Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?"
- from The Time Traveler's Wife
It is not a plot driven tale. The question of "Will they get together in the end" is replaced with "Can they get together?" which is a nice and unique trick. In the can they get together romances, lovers are separated by space. Here, it's time.
It's Kurt Vonnegut but with an extra four hundred pages and all the sophomoric political crap removed (not my observation) and replaced by the human element.
There's plenty of meditations on time and absence. Flashbacks are actual flashbacks allowing characters to offer commentary on the past in their present voice without the gauze of memory.
The writing is executed almost flawlessly. I'm a short book guy. I almost always think the middle third of any novel can be excised whole. But the high quality of writing in this novel and the development of character kept my attention. It's often said comedy is hard to write. It is. But romance that is romantic and heartfelt but not so syrupy that it gives its readers diabetes is so much harder to write. It's also much closer to what humans want and need. It provides insight into situations that are so common to us all. No one reflects back after a lifetime of reading and says, "Hey that post-apocalyptic dystopian zombie novel really helped me understand humanity more." But then again, maybe I've just not read the right post-apocalyptic dystopian zombie novel
I had two large qualms about the novel. The characters, while intensely developed, were what I thought of as stock characters. Our time traveler is the son of a talented opera singer who died tragically. His father is a tortured violinist. Our literal `lady-in-waiting' is the wealthy trust fund daughter of a poet mom doing a bad Sylvia Plath impersonation and a lawyer dad who pays for it all. Their best friends are a lawyer representing abused children and a put upon stay-at-home mom. (The real miracle isn't time travel but how those two have a home in a fashionable part of Chicago and send their kids to private school on that income.) They're urbane, urban, quote long dead authors and poets. They're sophisticated and progressive. No one really works for a living. Not really. I just think it'd be much more accessible if there were some blue collars around and not a bunch of poseurs fighting for the common man yet not really having to interact with him beyond allowing them to drive their cab.
There's even a bit where they play a version of monopoly by their own socialist rules and end it with a card that says "Great Leap Forward" and they all laugh. Who jokes about the Great Leap Forward? Who jokes about the communist (whose patois these folks imitate throughout the novel) killing millions of people? That leads me to my next qualm.
I found very few of the characters likeable. It's hard enough to like someone joking about the Great Leap Forward (or the Holocaust or the Killing Fields) They continually exhibit of selfishness or allow themselves to be victimized...just like all humans. However, the selfishness and victimization is really amped up here. I believe this element held back many in my book club from enjoying the book. However, I don't believe in holding the all-to-human actions of the characters against the novel.
It's a wonderfully well-written romance that doesn't use time travel as a gimmick but as an obstacle to love and a tool to comment on that love but I don't think you'd want these folks in your real life too much. In your reading life? They're AOK.
I am one that usually loves time travel books and/or movies. I must admit this one was the most complex with multiple journeys back and forth across time.
One might think by reading my title that the time travel itself is what left me confused. However, it was inconsistencies with the characters and/or circumstances that left me a bit perplexed.
For example, the author made it very clear that Henry did not have any control over when he would time travel or what time frame he would be traveling to. Yet, towards the end of the book, Clare is wondering why Henry is only “visiting” their daughter and very rarely “chooses” to visit with her. If Henry’s condition was triggered purely by his own genetic deficiencies, it is hard for me to believe that he wouldn’t have appeared to Clare more often in her later life, even if he didn’t want to hurt her any further.
Another thing that was mentioned was that Henry’s time traveling is often triggered when he is under extreme stress. While there were plenty of examples that corroborated this fact, like his mother’s death or on the morning of his wedding, I also remember him time traveling very randomly. I might be confusing the book with the movie, but I remember that he time traveled for a second time on the night of his wedding, when the stress of the day was over, also at times when they were just talking (like in the movie when he was carrying the dinner dishes to the table). These inconsistencies didn’t stop me from enjoying their story, it just made me wonder.
Speaking of the movie, I saw it first and chose to read the book, because books are usually better. While I did enjoy some of the book’s details that the movie didn’t have time to explore (like some of the scenes with Henry and Clare’s families), I do agree with some other reviewers who felt that the book was a little too vulgar, too long, and presented situations that were totally unnecessary to the main plot. I also didn’t care for the stereotypical portrayal of people of different ethnicities.
As a result, I actually enjoyed the movie more in this case. While I would have liked some more details that weren’t explained in the movie (which is why I chose to read the book), I felt that most of the details that were in the book and not in the movie were just extraneous, and were not pivotal to the main plot.
I also felt the movie did a really great job editing out not only the boring and cumbersome parts that made the book “drag” at times, but also some of the crude and insensitive plot devices that I felt stripped away some of the romance that was present in the movie.
If I was going to read a 500+ page book
I would have liked some extra character development for both Henry and Clare rather than endless descriptions of punk bands, museum exhibits, grocery lists, as well as secondary character crushes that only seemed to weaken Henry and Clare’s bond with each other rather than to strengthen it.
In conclusion, I would say if you loved the book, the movie might be disappointing. However, if you are a hopeless romantic, but found the book a little “too rough around the edges”, I would suggest giving the movie a try. It really does bring out the beauty of Henry and Clare’s love, without offending the senses.
Top reviews from other countries
The author is enriched, connects the text with shorts poetry at each stage of the novel.
I have walked with Henry and Clare. Their friends, Charisse, Ben.. Celia. The snakiest person I’ve ever read about.. Gomez. My hatred for him is unending. And their family.
I’d recommend this book to anyone with an open heart. It pushes a lot and throws normality away at time, but it is all worth it.
Till another time, my favorite novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife”. With another box of tissue.
Viagem no tempo, ainda mais envolvendo romance, é um assunto que me atrai muito. Fiquei completamente apaixonada pela temática e ao ler a história não poderia ser diferente. Poder acompanhar a vida de um viajante no tempo e suas implicações foi, em alguns momentos angustiante, revoltante e emocionante. Ele não escolheu passar por isso, simplesmente nasceu assim.
O livro é divido em partes. em cada uma delas há diversos capítulos e dentro de cada um, há separações temporais - começa com a data e a idade que ele tem no momento. Isso pode ser meio confuso no início porque o livro não tem uma linha do tempo linear. Então alguns acontecimentos só são revelados bem depois de quando realmente aconteceu, sem falar que alterna entre passado e futuro.
No meio da história pensei saber como seria o fim, mas eu estava enganada. A autora consegue nos surpreender no desenrolar dos fatos e preciso dizer que chorei muito depois de acompanhar essa linda história de amor que superou o tempo. Eles definitivamente nasceram um para o outro.
Algumas pessoas podem achar a escrita muito descritiva, no entanto eu gostei porque foi uma forma de expandir o meu vocabulário.
Se você curte romance, não pode deixar de ler.