Book Review: The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Niffenegger crafts a love story so intimate and true that it's difficult to displace from reality. Henry starts spontaneously time traveling when he's 8. He describes it as being similar to epilepsy - there are tell-tale signs when he's about to vanish, but he cannot stop it and cannot wish himself back or forward in time. At 36 he travels to a meadow where he meets a 6-year-old Clare who both is and will be his wife. Niffenegger documents their relationship and their lives together in and out and through time. It was interesting and enchanting, the way Henry knew and didn't know things. His past or future selves would leave clues or guide him through tough times. Though the novel is titled The Time Traveler's Wife, it is mostly about Henry and the effect his genetic disease has on Clare, the way she is forced to pick up the pieces and carry on without him, constantly waiting and worrying and wondering when he'll return to her. I like the title in that sense. It shows that even if the reader wanted to make Clare the main character instead of Henry, his presence is so deep within her that it's impossible to view them as separate beings. I think everyone hopes for a love like that. Their love is timeless and ephemeral simultaneously.

I feel as if Clare and Henry are still out there, somewhere in time, madly and desperately in love in a situation that forces them to rely wholly on each other. This novel was easy to read and filled with vibrant characters and gorgeous emotions. Do you know what I mean by that, saying a book has emotion? Like you can just open up the cover and be overwhelmed by it. In case you don't know what I mean, I've decided to include the letter Henry writes Clare in the event of his death -

December 10, 2006

Dearest Clare,
As I write this, I am sitting at my desk in the back bedroom looking out at your studio across the backyard full of blue evening snow, everything is slick and crusty with ice, and it is very still. It's one of those winter evenings when the coldness of every single thing seems to slow down time, like the narrow center or an hourglass which time itself flows through, but slowly, slowly. I have the feeling, very familiar to me when I am out of time but almost never otherwise, of being buoyed up by time, floating effortlessly on its surface like a fat lady swimmer. I had a sudden urge, tonight, here in the house by myself (you are at Alicia's recital at St. Lucy's) to write you a letter. I suddenly wanted to leave something, for after. I think that time is short, now. I feel as though all my reserves, of energy, of pleasure, of duration, are thin, small. I don't feel capable of continuing very much longer. I know you know.

If you are reading this, I am probably dead. (I say probably because you never know what circumstances may arise; it seems foolish and self-important to just declare one's own death as an out-and-out fact.) About this death of mine - I hope it was simple and clean and unambiguous. I hope it didn't create too much fuss. I'm sorry. (This reads like a suicide note. Strange.) But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second: whatever it was, this death, you know that it came and took me, like a child carried away by goblins.

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

I hate to think of you waiting. I know that you have been waiting for me all your life, always uncertain of how long this patch of waiting would be. Ten minutes, ten days. A month. What an uncertain husband I have been, Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus alone and buffeted by tall waves, sometime wily and sometimes just a plaything of the gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. Of me - put me deep inside you and then go out in the world and live. Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element. I have given you a life of suspended animation. I don't mean to say that you have done nothing. You have created beauty, and meaning, in your art, and Alba, who is so amazing, and for me: for me you have been everything.

After my mom died she ate up my father completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true, anyway.

Clare, there is one last thing, and I have hesitated to tell you, because I'm superstitiously afraid that telling might cause it to not happen (I know: silly) and also because I have just been going on about not waiting and this might cause you to wait longer than you have ever waited before. But I will tell you in case you need something, after.
Last summer, I was sitting in Kendrick's waiting room when I suddenly found myself in a dark hallway in a house I don't know. I was sort of tangled up in a bunch of galoshes, and it smelled like rain. At the end of the hall I could see a rim of light around a door, and so I went very slowly and very quietly to the door and looked in. The room was white, and intensely lit with morning sun. At the window, with her back to me, sat a woman, wearing a coral-colored [sic] cardigan sweater, with long white hair all down her back. She had a cup of tea beside her, on a table. I must have made some little noise, or she sensed me behind her . . . she turned and saw me, and I saw her, and it was you, Clare, this was you as an old woman, in the future. It was sweet, Clare, it was sweet beyond telling, to come as though from death to hold you, and to see all the years present in your face. I won't tell you any more, so you can imagine it, so you can have it unrehearsed when the time comes, as it will, as it does come. We will see each other again, Clare. Until then, live, fully, present in the world, which is so beautiful.

It's dark, now, and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.

Henry