Mood:
cheekyTopic: Entertainment
Last night, I did something I haven't done in a long time—I read. In complete silence. For hours.
I was on pins and needles trying to finish Audrey Niffenegger's first book, The Time Traveler's Wife. So far, I haven't read much this summer, and frankly I blame that on drinking too much, and not having my usual amount of alone time. So, I was happy to come home to a quiet apartment, leave the television off, and curl up with about 300 pages of good writing.
I did finish it, and I really, really liked it. However, I have no clue how to explain this book. In a nutshell, it's about a girl, Clare, who is in love with a man who travels through time. They try to have a friendship, then later a relationship and a marriage, all while he travels back and forth through different periods of his life.
At the end of the book, there is a reading group guide that might help me explain myself a little further. Here is the last question of the guide, question 16:
How does the author use time travel as a metaphor: for love, for loss and absence, for fate, for aging, for death? To what extent are Clare and Henry a "normal" couple?
Technically, we are all "time traveler's," it's just that we are traveling forward through time, living our lives in the order of the sun, seconds, minutes and hours, as they fall. Henry, on the other hand, has lived his entire life once, and moves back and forth through it again, jumping back through time or into the future with no warning or notice.
Time travel as a metaphor for love is an interesting concept. It's like when people say, "maybe it was just bad timing." There is something to be said about timing and the effect it has on love. In order for things to work, both people in the relationship have to be at the right moment in their life. So as each person is traveling through time, they must cross each other's paths at exactly the right moment, or the relationship may fail.
This idea goes hand in hand with using time as a metaphor for fate. To blame a relationship's failures on bad timing is to ignore fate. If we rely on fate to get us to our match ultimately, then it wasn't bad timing, it was fate leading us to The One.
Henry and Clare's relationship didn't work until they officially met in the present, in 1990. Before that, Clare was too young, or Henry was too old. Once Henry reaches the present, their relationship seems to grow, they fall in love and time seems to stop.
Now, as for time travel as a metaphor for loss, absence, death, and aging? This is a little less clear to me, but it comes in the form of Henry and Clare and their attempts at starting a family. While they argue about their miscarriages and how there is a chance Clare could die—Henry has seen her give birth, live, and seen his daughter as a young lady. So he knew somewhere that Clare wouldn't die. Same as the scene when Clare is 16, driving down the road with her eyes closed, she says she knows she doesn't die, so why not? Both of them, mess with fate and often don't seem to trust it.
BLAM! Look who's the English major...I can still analyze text. Go me.
Seriously, I enjoyed this book. It made me think. I love the characters and their struggles—it wasn't so polished and clean like most fiction novels are. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I will—even if I already know it won't be as good as the book.
