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2006-03-22 12:28
From: zeze
(New Jersey)
a review of The Time Traveler's Wife
 
I have to say, I would have got some very different impressions on this book several years ago, before I went through my Art School years in the US.
First of all, the novel is an expanded web starting from one single interesting idea of Time Traveling. The author refused to stop there holding this golden idea. She obviously went on a long journey of question asking and exploration of the unknown. It’s so much like a design project or a non-restricted paper writing in Art School. Your work does not have to be Perfect for it’s Art, but it has to be original, multi-depth and showing the efforts of development. This exploration is well organized, calmly paced, determined and even stubborn sometimes. The possibilities are pushed to create new edges of itself, new questions await are being considered, and the novel grows as such there’s a fourth dimension to it—Time, if you don’t mind, is growing along within this process, slowly, yet unstoppably.
There are many professional and talented authors who write using their brilliant ideas and sensitive feelings. They do their good job. But it is not often to see them exploring with this Art School style in the possible areas around their topics. Their writing normally is Telling what they have, rather than a process of their own progress. Even though writing ultimately is a process of progress for any writer, most of them rarely show it in the work itself. They hide it, they pretend it’s something they Know and have known for all the time and it’s time to let you know. So the work is rather flat. They tend to simply brush the surrounding of one bright center to make it fit the whole plot in a balanced manner, as a part of the entire structure of the story. There’s nothing wrong about it. But this book is different from it in such an interesting way that I’m so familiar with. It seems to some reviewers slow and repetitive, but I would rather call it Unwearied. I could almost see the thin threads she drew on her sketch pad linking all the possible question marks on the map of this story. The center, Time Traveling, is alive in this sense by connecting and growing beyond ordinary expectations. I felt happy when reading it for this reason. I felt I was somehow connected to the author by knowing her technique and understanding her intentions.
On the other hand, the writing shows the typical Art School style of indulgency. From the wealthy background of the family, to normal one-income couple with extravagant house and studio, to pretty art friends parties, they speak French and German, quote poets, and go to Sushi restaurant so frequently when she is still in School, and so on. The lack of definition in these parts is sort of questionable. It is like a figure skater in the final round giving up her attention on the tip of her fingers. She is wonderful, but her poses are a bit sloppy without the clear gestures the stretching fingers could have made. You would tell she is not aware of it. The relaxed fingers are the real her.
The author also made a questionable decision to throw in some of the additional spices to the story. Almost all of the characters are dramatic in a pop-fiction way. His mother: died in a ruthless car accident on the peak of her career; her mother: mentally unstable and suicidal. Kimmy, the landlady and nanny of his, lost her husband and the one child when she was 8. His ex: drug addict who committed suicide. His friend: homosexual with AIDS. His doctor: first son born with dawn-syndrome.
It might not have to be all so much. It is also like the typical Art School artist work: meaningful, interesting, yet expressed with a rather personal preference that annoys some of the audience.
It is not fair, though, to require a graduate and a teacher of art school, an artist of paper sculpture to avoid being attracted (or distracted) by the beauty of forms. It surely is unattractive to some readers, especially those who read the book as a Sci-fi, that the author is so focused on the beautiful shapes and lightings of the details, the flowing of the sentences and the rowing of the words on the tip of the tongue, and the somehow shallow little pleasures in the life that she herself is familiar with. It surely seems fluffy, even pretentious to those who want to read about a scientific explanation of the Time Traveling, the hard core of something that matters to them. I do understand it. Therefore I have to admit that I read this book with a hint of unfairness. I know I would not have smiled at it if I was not there in an Art School working on my creative projects in the art school way.
I chose to focus on the core of the book, reading the real meanings of it. I appreciate how she created this parallel world of a fiction to tell a truth that lies in our world. It’s a soaring victory of love over time. Her best strength is not in the details, in the structure of the pretty sentences or in the characters, but in her perspective. Her tireless exploration made the details fill her fictional world to be almost totally real. Therefore, the sushi restaurant could vanish, the giant house of childhood disappear, the intelligent friends and their clever conversations over, and the naked Henry and naked Clare could be you, and me.
This review is helpful to 3 person.
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By Audrey Niffenegger
Harvest Books
ISBN: 015602943X
Release Date: 2004-05-27
Paperback
List Price: USD 14.00
 More descriptions and reviews
More reviews from zeze:
wonderful concept, rather slow plot  
typical, and touching, and typically touching
a female version of the Da Vinci Code
All reviews (4)
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