I need to get one more post out about this book because there was one theme that stuck out and didn't seem resolved. The reason for the unresolved feeling was probably due to the nature of this theme since it was unrequited love.
The two main instances of it were between Ingrid and Henry and also between Gomez and Clare.
To start with Ingrid, here's a brief background. She is the girlfriend of Henry (the time traveler) until he meets Clare at the age of 28. During his relationship with Ingrid, he wasn't yet a very good person. He was a brawler, a womanizer, he felt lost and hopeless with his condition, etc. After meeting Clare this all changed of course (awww). Looking back, I can't understand what exactly was so bad about Ingrid. He narrates that she waited patiently for him to one day settle down and marry her with mild amusement. As if the notion is ridiculous.
Okay now there are some spoilers ahead as I continue to discuss Ingrid. She definitely didn't deserve her fate. What happens is that Henry accidentally time travels to her apartment one night, and they have discussion covering the fact that in Henry's present, he is married and has a daughter. She then mentions that she wanted kids one day, and that she loved Henry. After this, she shoots herself. How are readers supposed to justify that in their minds? Are we supposed to be on Henry's side for up and leaving Ingrid in favor of Clare...just because he felt like it? Unless you're willing to believe in undying love (which is kind of the whole point of this book I guess) Henry and Clare kind of seem like a pair of inconsiderate jerks that leave pain and heartbreak in their wake.
Now take the situation with Clare and Gomez. Later in the book (another spoiler for the book, so don't read this if you have any intention of reading this book, which I highly recomend you do) it is revealed that Clare's faithfulness to Henry slipped just one time between the age of 18 and 20 when she could not see a future-Henry or a present-Henry and his 26/27 year old self at the time didn't know that she existed. If you can't follow that, don't blame me. It's complicated. Anyhow, she gets drunk at a party and goes home with Gomez, feels terrible the next morning, and leaves. Not too big of a deal except for the fact that Gomez is and will remain in love with her for the entirety of this novel. He never comes close to getting Clare, despite his attempts to get her to not date Henry (who is known for his bad character). It's not like he deserves her any less than Henry does. The only consolation is that he doesn't end up killing himself but instead gets married and has a bunch of bouncing babies.
So in conclusion to this inconclusive topic, I think it's incredibly...brave and realistic of Niffenegger to include these two characters in her love story. It shows that no matter how "right" her audience is supposed to feel about the bond between Henry and Clare, there are these totally innocent casualties that will never be happy. Nothings clean cut and black and white. Yes, this book was very good.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Friday, January 2, 2009
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
I was way too harsh on this book in my last post. I just finished it, and those criticisms that I cited in yesterday's post are basically the only ones that there are.
I'm not going to refrain from spoiling the ending, but I think that people should really read this book (if you don't mind some inappropriate scenes and language).
It saddened me a bit when I was about 3/4 through the book that Henry and Clare had become old and sad. Clare has trouble carrying a child and suffers from, what, six miscarriages? Scenes where she is sobbing and covered in blood are sharply contrasted to her earlier, happier self when Niffenegger reminds us that at this time, Henry is visiting the young Clare in the Meadow. It's sad seeing characters grow up in books, and it's even worse when all of the sudden while you're reading, you realize that the most vibrant and happy time of their lives is over. Then you have to remind yourself that these people are fictional, but it doesn't really take the sadness away. Wouldn't it be horrible when one day it strikes you personally that your best day are over? Good thing I'm still young.
The time travel reminds me of reading a book (bear with me here). Henry can go back to the young Clare, he can go and see Ingrid (his drug-addict, depressed, and eventual suicide-committing ex-girlfriend) but he knows how it will all end up. Readers can do the same with a book. They can read the beginning over and over and see the happy times, but they know what will happen in the end. It reminds me of my mom who only likes to watch the first two episodes of the mini-series version of Brideshead Revisited. Before everything bad happens when Sebastian and Charles are just having a good time in Oxford and in Brideshead.
In fact, Brideshead popped up in my head while I was reading the book because of Clare's aforementioned rich, dysfunctional family. I realized that Niffenegger knew where she drew her inspiration from when Clare is reading Brideshead Revisited in a later scene.
Literary references dot this book since Henry is a librarian and quotations are inserted in between the parts (there are 3 parts that are not remotely evenly sized). The one that I was actually familiar with was at the very end which was taken from The Odyssey about Odysseus coming back to his faithful wife. Henry similarly comes back to Clare when he makes a leap to the distant future (she is 83) when he is 43, the age at which he will die. He writes her a letter that tells her that this will happen which she reads after his death. So she waits for him faithfully for this day. Well, she's not totally faithful because she allows Gomez to... until she cries out Henry's name and his wife Charisse comes home, but I guess that doesn't count because she was so lonely after Henry's death and imagined it was him. Either way, I don't really appreciate the reference to the Odyssey because I don't think that was a love story at all. Penelope is cheated on for about 500 pages of tedium and Odysseus is a jerk... He doesn't deserve Penelope, but Henry deserves Clare.
These characters really love each other, and I get that. It's pretty sad to begrudgingly admit this then watch them be separated for so many years, but that's the beauty of a novel. It can really absorb you and make you feel things that have no basis to them, that are only ink printed on paper.
I'm not going to refrain from spoiling the ending, but I think that people should really read this book (if you don't mind some inappropriate scenes and language).
It saddened me a bit when I was about 3/4 through the book that Henry and Clare had become old and sad. Clare has trouble carrying a child and suffers from, what, six miscarriages? Scenes where she is sobbing and covered in blood are sharply contrasted to her earlier, happier self when Niffenegger reminds us that at this time, Henry is visiting the young Clare in the Meadow. It's sad seeing characters grow up in books, and it's even worse when all of the sudden while you're reading, you realize that the most vibrant and happy time of their lives is over. Then you have to remind yourself that these people are fictional, but it doesn't really take the sadness away. Wouldn't it be horrible when one day it strikes you personally that your best day are over? Good thing I'm still young.
The time travel reminds me of reading a book (bear with me here). Henry can go back to the young Clare, he can go and see Ingrid (his drug-addict, depressed, and eventual suicide-committing ex-girlfriend) but he knows how it will all end up. Readers can do the same with a book. They can read the beginning over and over and see the happy times, but they know what will happen in the end. It reminds me of my mom who only likes to watch the first two episodes of the mini-series version of Brideshead Revisited. Before everything bad happens when Sebastian and Charles are just having a good time in Oxford and in Brideshead.
In fact, Brideshead popped up in my head while I was reading the book because of Clare's aforementioned rich, dysfunctional family. I realized that Niffenegger knew where she drew her inspiration from when Clare is reading Brideshead Revisited in a later scene.
Literary references dot this book since Henry is a librarian and quotations are inserted in between the parts (there are 3 parts that are not remotely evenly sized). The one that I was actually familiar with was at the very end which was taken from The Odyssey about Odysseus coming back to his faithful wife. Henry similarly comes back to Clare when he makes a leap to the distant future (she is 83) when he is 43, the age at which he will die. He writes her a letter that tells her that this will happen which she reads after his death. So she waits for him faithfully for this day. Well, she's not totally faithful because she allows Gomez to... until she cries out Henry's name and his wife Charisse comes home, but I guess that doesn't count because she was so lonely after Henry's death and imagined it was him. Either way, I don't really appreciate the reference to the Odyssey because I don't think that was a love story at all. Penelope is cheated on for about 500 pages of tedium and Odysseus is a jerk... He doesn't deserve Penelope, but Henry deserves Clare.
These characters really love each other, and I get that. It's pretty sad to begrudgingly admit this then watch them be separated for so many years, but that's the beauty of a novel. It can really absorb you and make you feel things that have no basis to them, that are only ink printed on paper.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Wow, what a book. I'm going to try very hard to keep this post at a normal length, but that won't be easy. I'm 287 pages through this 536 page book, and thoughts just keep popping up.
To sum the plot up in a couple sentences, Henry DeTamble is a librarian that has a medical condition in which is involuntarily snaps to different places in time and then eventually snaps back. As he matures, he can get further and further away from the present and travelling to the past is easier than travelling to the future where, "the air is thin." Clare Abshire is some "beautiful artbabe" from a rich dysfunctional family who is visited by Henry from the age of 6 in the "Meadow". He reveals to her that eventually they will be married, so Clare is already deeply in love (and in lust which is so wrong in so many ways since she's a teenager and he's in his 30's/40's while he visits her) with him by the time they actually meet when she's 20 and he's 28.
Wow, that paragraph is pretty big already... I guess I'll only be able to talk about a couple things that strike me about this book.
a) Nifenegger (what a name...) has let her restraint get away from her and has created a book full of impossibly beautiful people. It makes the book less realistic in my opinion. I'm not saying that she even needs to make anyone really ugly, she should just refrain from describing people physically unless it's really important to the story. For an example, it would be okay for her to describe Clare's hair (long, rich, thick, coppery, and utterly perfect of course...) because Henry likes talking about it. Fine, whatever, it has something to do with the plot. But her obsession with making Henry impossibly beautiful who takes after his mother who is ravishing and his ex-girlfriend who is practically a supermodel just gets a little annoying. I remember when I was about 10 I liked to write stories where everyone was breath-takingly beautiful. As I am no longer a child, I don't do that anymore.
b) I'm not totally convinced with the love story. Every critique on the book is about what a "dizzyingly romantic" story it is, but I'm not really feeling it. Maybe we're supposed to feel uncertain about it, because they never really chose each other, it just kind of happened. Future Henry came to Past Clare with the knowledge that they would be together, and they did...just because they would. That sentence is not supposed to make sense, because time travel never makes sense. I wonder when authors/screenplay writers will get over it and realize that a really great story can't come about when the backdrop to it is an imbroglio.
c) One thing I really like about this book is Gomez, the polish attorney who wants "the revolution" and has the violently idealistic quality of many other fictional just-out-university city dwellers. He has a kind of faux-flirtatious protective feeling for Clare which somehow makes him more sympathetic to me than Henry. Of course, he's also impossibly beautiful. I don't know what the author was thinking when she wrote this book...
To sum the plot up in a couple sentences, Henry DeTamble is a librarian that has a medical condition in which is involuntarily snaps to different places in time and then eventually snaps back. As he matures, he can get further and further away from the present and travelling to the past is easier than travelling to the future where, "the air is thin." Clare Abshire is some "beautiful artbabe" from a rich dysfunctional family who is visited by Henry from the age of 6 in the "Meadow". He reveals to her that eventually they will be married, so Clare is already deeply in love (and in lust which is so wrong in so many ways since she's a teenager and he's in his 30's/40's while he visits her) with him by the time they actually meet when she's 20 and he's 28.
Wow, that paragraph is pretty big already... I guess I'll only be able to talk about a couple things that strike me about this book.
a) Nifenegger (what a name...) has let her restraint get away from her and has created a book full of impossibly beautiful people. It makes the book less realistic in my opinion. I'm not saying that she even needs to make anyone really ugly, she should just refrain from describing people physically unless it's really important to the story. For an example, it would be okay for her to describe Clare's hair (long, rich, thick, coppery, and utterly perfect of course...) because Henry likes talking about it. Fine, whatever, it has something to do with the plot. But her obsession with making Henry impossibly beautiful who takes after his mother who is ravishing and his ex-girlfriend who is practically a supermodel just gets a little annoying. I remember when I was about 10 I liked to write stories where everyone was breath-takingly beautiful. As I am no longer a child, I don't do that anymore.
b) I'm not totally convinced with the love story. Every critique on the book is about what a "dizzyingly romantic" story it is, but I'm not really feeling it. Maybe we're supposed to feel uncertain about it, because they never really chose each other, it just kind of happened. Future Henry came to Past Clare with the knowledge that they would be together, and they did...just because they would. That sentence is not supposed to make sense, because time travel never makes sense. I wonder when authors/screenplay writers will get over it and realize that a really great story can't come about when the backdrop to it is an imbroglio.
c) One thing I really like about this book is Gomez, the polish attorney who wants "the revolution" and has the violently idealistic quality of many other fictional just-out-university city dwellers. He has a kind of faux-flirtatious protective feeling for Clare which somehow makes him more sympathetic to me than Henry. Of course, he's also impossibly beautiful. I don't know what the author was thinking when she wrote this book...
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