A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.
An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.
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Art School Fiction writing
zeze(New Jersey)
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 st......
full review2006-03-22 12:28 | comment
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