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.