Fiction: The Time Traveler's Wife

 OK I just finished "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger and I was just blown away.

Not very often does a book come along with a completely new concept, a totally new way of describing the indescribable source of love, the incredibly complex lives of lovers and the impact of Time. This one does all of those things. It started off slowly and I was a bit annoyed at the pacing of it but as I continued to get drawn into the story of Henry and Clare, I realized that it had to start off slowly in order to get the hang of the time travel, the complexity of the chapter notations and titles, the layering of time.

I thought of the onion analogy a lot as I went through. How the story sort of peels away as it goes by, each chapter revealing the next layer, the next emotional rollercoaster. And perhaps jerked to teariness with each subsequent miscarriage.

I heard the book once described as romantic fiction, but I am not sure that I agree. Yes, it had degrees of romance, yes it was about people who fell in and perhaps out of love, yes it was about jealousy and desire and sex. But I don't know that with the way these elements came together that I would classify it as heartwarmingly romantic.

I was a bit put off by the ending. I don't know what I expected or how else I would have wanted things to go but I was left with a strange sense of incompleteness. As though some deus ex machina were suddenly going to make its way into the mechanism of the book and bring all to a more satisfactory close. Don't get me wrong, I liked that it wasn't a happily ever ending in the broadest sense but it was enough so.

I think that when enough time has passed that I don't dream of the characters at night, I will likely read this one again and see if it stands up to my remembrances.