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The Time Traveler's Wife Paperback – May 27, 2004
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An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.
- Print length546 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateMay 27, 2004
- Dimensions5.75 x 1.75 x 8 inches
- ISBN-10015602943X
- ISBN-13978-0156029438
- Lexile measure720L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Tremendous grace and imagination . . . A love story without softness or flinchiing." -- The Washington Post Book World
"[A] time-travel love story par excellence. . . . [A] soaring celebration of thhe victory of love over time." -- Chicago Tribune
Spirited . . . Niffenegger plays ingeniously in her temporal hall of mirrors." -- The New Yorker
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.
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Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books (May 27, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 546 pages
- ISBN-10 : 015602943X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0156029438
- Lexile measure : 720L
- Item Weight : 1.15 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1.75 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #495,906 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,461 in Time Travel Romances
- #4,897 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #9,722 in Romantic Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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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 love time travel concepts, and I digest everything I can on the topic. An interesting contrast to this book is the movie "Butterfly Effect." I enjoyed that movie, but the movie was full of holes, and the consistency of the time travel didn't make sense in places. This book contrasts to that movie because this book is rock solid. I know time travel is fantastic, but the author plays very consistently within the "world" she creates in this book. So, given that the author's premise actually could happen, she expertly and soundly crafts her story within a very consistent science fiction premise.
I also really like that this book was written by a woman. I think with this book, Audrey Niffenegger proves women can write science fiction better than men.
This is probably the most accessible science fiction book I have ever read. At my book club where we discussed this book, most of the women didn't like it, but they said as far as science fiction, it was probably the most likeable of a science fiction book they could think of.
There are tons of ways to look at this book. It seems like everyone I've talked to about this has picked up different things from it. One person said she really liked how this book talks about soul mates. One person said it reminded her of what Alzheimer's patients go through when they live in the past. I really felt it gave a message of hope in a situation of finality.
I've usually been disappointed in "best sellers," but I was very pleasantly surprised. I loved the language in this book. She uses very interesting language and has a very fun vocabulary. I'm not a dog ear-er, but I dog eared about five pages where I loved the way she described things. My favorite quote from the book is this: "And Noah was a weird old man with a houseboat and a lot of cats."
Henry reminded me a lot of myself. He's cold. He does what he needs to do to survive.
I cried when I read this book, and I don't know if a book has moved me that much before. I feel embarrassed saying that, but I count the 20.3 million amazon customers among my closest friends, so I'll confide I not only cried, but I wept.
I don't want to give anything away, and I'm not sure if I could give anything away if I wanted to because this book is so hard to describe. I don't think you could describe it in fewer words than the author used to write it.
But, there are situations that happened in this book, because of the time travel theme, that evoke unique emotions. Just one example is how Henry is able to get to know his mom as an adult (from observing her from a distance) even though he didn't know her very well, because she died when he was young.
I recommend this book to everyone.
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.