Yzabel / January 11, 2013

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

My rating: [rating=2]

Summary:

This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry was thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. In the face of this force they can neither prevent nor control, Henry and Clare’s struggle to lead normal lives is both intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

Review:

This book is pretty difficult to rate; I’m not even sure if I want to give it 2 stars or 3, because there are quite a few things in it I liked, and quite a few things I found hard to stand.

Like with some other books I read in the past months, I think I was expecting something else—something shorter, too: some parts I could have done without, because they didn’t bring much to the story as a whole, and felt like they were just delaying the unavoidable. Conversely, I wish the author had spent more time tackling a few problems that should have arisen regarding Henry, especially since she described other issues that came with his chrono-deficiency.

Those very issues were something I appreciated reading about, even though they made Henry hard to like in parts, because they raised interesting questions. For instance, Henry’s coldness at having to regularly steal, pick locks, mug other people, and so on; however, if one had had to do that for his/her whole life, wouldn’t s/he have ended up distancing him/herself the same way? (That, or ending up dying young because of too many scruples.) So, it didn’t make the character very likeable, but it was still a logical development for me. On the other hand, I felt like too many other problems were left aside, such as “how did he manage to hold a steady job like he did?” Also, the setting seemed a little too one-sided (middle-class people, with some annoying clichés).

I’m also shared regarding relationships in this book, more specifically Henry’s and Clare’s. While Clare’s love for him is logical enough, considering she’s known him all her life, Henry’s develops a little too fast (“it’s OK because she’s seen my future self, so I suppose it’s going to happen anyway” is just a tad bit far-fetched). And I found Clare too passive and dependent.

Truth be told, I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting from this novel. It wasn’t bad, but it left me with a lingering feeling of frustration.