The Time Traveler's Wife

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Read: May 1st - June 10th, 2015

Shane: Liked

Sandra: Liked

    I just recently finished The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s the first book Sandra (my wife) and I read for our as-yet-untitled book club (we're the Booktastic Duo!). In an act of brevity, I’d like to keep this between 500-1,000 words. Let’ see how that goes!

    First of all, I loved this book. Loved it. I had seen it on many “top time travel books” list, and that got me pretty interested. See, I enjoy myself a good time travel story. To me, nothing is more fascinating, more mind bending, nothing leaves my brain more open to possibilities than a well-done time travel story. Before I get into the time travel stuff, I want to also say that I had never heard of this book until the movie came out years ago. When I saw commercials for it, I didn’t get a grasp on just how much time travel factors into this movie (and book). I thought it was some dumb love story. And, at its core, I suppose it is. Love wins the day. But we don’t get there without time traveling.

    Okay, time travel. It rocks, am I right? Now, despite my love of the very idea of time travel, I’m not greatly versed in it. I’ve read The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells; Replay by Ken Grimwood; The Chronoliths, by Robert Charles Wilson; 11/22/63 by Stephen King; also, a host of short stories by Heinlein (“-All You Zombies-” is a wild ride), Philip K. Dick, Bradbury, and Larry Niven (Flight of the Horse has some great stories); hell I watched and loved Lost (I guess spoilers for Lost. Oops). So I’ve read some, but I know there’s umpteen novels and stories I haven’t experienced. I will say, the time travel mechanic in this book is one I’ve never seen before, and it’s extremely creative and unique. In the book, the BAREBONES plot is about a man who has a genetic disorder that causes him to randomly time travel (both to the past and the future). It’s a story about his life and the general trials and tribulations of not being in control of something as crucial as  where he is in the time stream. With this idea, you are really taken for a ride through decades and years and months and days. Sometimes he visits his child-self, sometimes he sees his future self, hell, sometimes he’s in the present, and a version of himself (past-or-future) will appear. Niffenegger does a great job of making this both as disorienting as it must be to Henry (the main character who time travels), and generally easy to follow. I’ll admit, even though I was gung-ho about the time travel element, it can get a little confusing. I think anytime you’re taking in such an alien and frankly mind-fuck idea as time travel, there’s always a bit of confusion. Or maybe that’s just me because I’m stupid! Finally, I really enjoy the reason for his time travel to be a genetic disorder. It’s simple and brilliant.

    As I stated, I really wanted to read this book because I knew it was a good time travel story. But, that’s not all it is. In fact, the Chicago Tribune, right on the front cover of my copy has a quote: “A soaring celebration of love over time.” In the end, I know that’s what Niffenegger wanted. I haven’t read my wife’s write-up yet, but I bet she’s focusing more on the love story than I am [edit: d’oh, was wrong about that]. In fact, I’m almost a page in and I’ve barely mentioned it. Does that make me some dumb “guy” that doesn’t care about the touching love story displayed here? Well, not entirely. The story is told through both Henry’s and Clare’s (his wife) points of view. I really liked Henry as a character (mostly), but whenever it transitioned to Clare’s PoV, I was always kind of rolling my eyes. Henry’s story is great, and his character is pretty funny and on-the-whole likable. Clare’s, eh, not so much. I feel for her, because her situation sucks. Always waiting around for your time traveling husband to return to the present must be an awful way to live. In general, Henry’s life must also be terrible. Is it really worth trying to have a normal life when you’re constantly bouncing around the timestream like some cosmic pinball? However, I will say, the final 20-or-so pages are simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming. The book closes on a perfectly somber note, and it works well. I came for the time travel, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a pretty good love story (although it’s still got moments of icky love story blecch).

    There were a few things I didn’t like. Besides not being nearly as invested in Clare’s story and PoV as I was with Henry’s, both of them seemed very sophisticated, to a detriment. They went to operas, and talked about art, and old literature, and poetry, and old punk music. All these sections in the book where they just talked about their hobbies, holy shit were they uninteresting. I would feel like a damn schlub if I were there friends. I probably couldn’t even hold a conversation with them, because I like Stephen King and not some old, hungry Russian novelist. Also, I have a bit of a problem with the very title of the book. It should really be called The Time Traveler. I feel this is much more Henry’s story than it is his wife’s. This is all petty, small stuff. The positives of the book far outweigh the negatives: great story, fascinating use of time travel, good, real, characters, and lots of twists and turns throughout.

    As I’m closing in on my pre-set 1,000 word limit, I’d like to leave you all with two quotes that I thought were funny in their ridiculousness and their straightforwardness, respectively:

“I now have an erection that is probably tall enough to ride some of the scarier rides at Great America without a parent.” (page 17 of the Harcourt paperback)

“I accidentally catch the eye of the anesthesiologist, whose expression plainly says What kind of a pussy are you, anyway?” (page 401. This made me laugh out loud. This comes right after Henry recites a German poem from memory)

Highly recommended

**also, does he blow himself in this book?

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MUSINGS ON THE MOVIE:

    Sandra and I watched the movie adaptation of Time Traveler’s Wife a few nights ago. I had decently high hopes going in. I’m not going to write another 1,000 words about the movie, but I’ll go over quickly what I liked and I hat I didn’t like.

    I really wanted to treat this movie as its own entity, as opposed to comparing it to the book. That was pretty impossible. At least a dozen times throughout the movie I directly compared it to the book. So that’s what I’ll do here. In comparing it to the book, I could more easily see the many ways in which it fails in telling the story in a meaningful way.

My biggest problem with this movie overall is that it really feels rushed. I was shocked to see that the run time was only one hour and forty-seven minutes. For such a dense, long-ish book, I was expecting over two hours, at least. I’m not sure what someone who hadn’t read the book would think, but to my wife and I it was plainly obvious how they flew over many key things. I’m going to get into movie/book spoilers that I tried to avoid in my main write-up. The movie omits the entire character of Ingrid; it rushes to the wedding (which is at least halfway through the book. It’s maybe 30 minutes into the movie), they only have two miscarriages as opposed to seven (the pregnancy part seems very glossed over); their relationship with Gomez, Charisse, and even Kendrick as a family friend are shallow at best; even small details, like the way Henry convinces Kendrick that he is a time traveler are changed, for the worse. I was mostly disappointed at the things they left out, and what they changed I thought were too important to change. As a byproduct of being rushed, it’s hard to care about the characters as much. You barely care for them at all, quite honestly. There’s just not enough time spent with any of them. The acting is all fine, with Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams as the leads. One change they did make which I didn’t hate (although I still preferred the book) was the ending. Clare gets a little more closure and gets to see Henry one final (?) time.

I’m not going to give this movie a rating, because you can find that all over the web. I will say that I would only suggest this movie to someone who has read the book and is curious how it turns out on the big screen.

Thanks for reading and keep reading!
-Shane

Unlike Shane, I'll keep this short and sweet...

This was my second time reading The Time Traveler's Wife, and I've been trying to get Shane to read it for years now. I'm pretty sure we bought this book so he could read it like a million years ago. And finally, finally, we geeked up, started a book club and I twisted his arm to read it (It was actually his idea, but who cares!). Everyone thinks time travel sounds so cool and like so much fun, but this book just shows you how shitty it actually could be. What if you had no say in when you go, where you go or why you go? You just go. Poof, you're gone. Oh, and naked. You're also very naked because, let's face it, your clothes cannot time travel. I suppose there's still cool things to it, you can see things before they happen or go back to a place and time you missed. But, there's still so many factors that suck to it. I dunno, but thanks Niffenegger, I do not want to time travel. Poor Henry and poor Clare. I still don't know who I feel more sadness for. Him because he's always going with no control or her because she's always waiting, waiting, waiting. Ever since she was a little girl in the meadow, she was always waiting for Henry to come, for their life to begin. When Henry would just disappear in the middle of a conversation, she was left waiting. Even after Henry is gone, Clare is still waiting for him. Always waiting because he gives Alba dates for Clare when he's coming back. Henry tells Clare about the future and how she will be really old and she will see him again, so again, poor Clare is waiting. I'm left to believe that she doesn't ever get over him and that she is constantly waiting until the next time she sees him. But Henry, he cannot control leaving. He tries so hard. He runs all the time to relieve stress, he avoids watching television, but still, he's always gone. Constantly naked, traveling, stealing, getting into fights and getting worse as he ages. When they try to have a child, I never thought that they would have had as many complications as they do but since it's a gene disorder, I suppose it makes sense, but fuck having to deal with all that nonsense and the amount of times Clare subjects herself to it? Why Clare, why?! And I don't even want to talk about the ending, even though you know for almost a hundred pages what's going to happen, it still sucks the tears right out of you. Go read this. Or don't, your loss.

Now, onto the movie! I had seen this movie when it first came out and before I knew it was even a book. I'm pretty sure I loved it. What was not to love? Eric Bana is a great actor and Rachel McAdams is a babe. Then... we finished reading the book and watched it. But it felt rushed. It's still good, don't get me wrong. I smiled, felt sad and happy for both of them and bawled my eyes out at the end. But I think there were so many important things missing or changed. So many memories or incidents rushed before your eyes. You just come in expecting more that's all. 

-Sandra