the time traveler's wife by audrey niffenegger

june has been a busy month. on the 29th, in the evening, i get a gift from my sister, and it is of course the time traveler's wife by audrey niffenegger, our next book club read.

july 1st, the next day i finish the book. an easy, light and smooth read probably because it is modern fiction. a love story, albeit with an unconventional format.
or is it science fiction? have not been reading much into the lovey stuff actually. prefer the literary type. this one has too much love and too much sex in it. but good for a change.

lydia, a friend, says she adores this book and has read it a few times. so my curiosity is raised and that is how i finish it in a day.

highly original. a soaring love story. a life long passion. detailed scenes. and dates. dates and dates.

in the beginning. i flip back the pages to check the dates since henry de tamble is travelling so often. after a while i realise that most of the time zones are chronologically following clare abshire's life.

henry is the time traveler. and claire is the time traveler's wife.

henry jumps around unpredictably in the timestream, appearing in the future or the past at random. claire is someone who is normal, who adjusts her life to the missing henry every now and then. the marriage is a challenge especially when there is difficulty in conceiving a child due to henry's chrono displacement disorder. essentially henry travels through time like some people have seizures or multiple personalities. when he is stressed or is unable to cope with a situation, boom...he disappears leaving his clothes behind and appears elsewhere in a different time zone, naked.

he revisits claire many times in her life, the youngest is when she was 6. we see how this impairment affects him, and what kind of adjustments he has to make to cope with these time travels. despite the unbelievable nature of time travel, niffenegger manages to keep us with her and not to question it but to go along with what she has to present.

i think love is a powerful emotion, more than that of even fear which can cripple you. perhaps for claire, the risk is worth the reward of seeing henry for whatever time she is able to. the risk is always worth the reward when there is love. it makes us the eternal optimists of our lives. with love everything seems possible and achievable.

needless to say, i loved the references to music in this book. an extremely convenient way for niffenegger to clearly define the era that the narrative is taking place in. i read later in some interview that she actually visits bands and listens to their songs, goes for their concerts during her free time. i think music is like good art, they speak to people in different ways.

the past, present and future intersect resulting in hinted information revealed earlier even though the actual experience cannot be altered. the time traveling is interesting, niffenegger does a wonderful job of it and she places the sequences in an eventual `easy to understand' form and therefore it unfolds well and our minds can piece together the story as easily as if there were no jumping dates. a lot of thought has been put into getting the time travelling right. great work.

i hear they are making a movie with eric bana as henry and rachel mcadams as claire, due to be released middle of next year. would be interesting to watch it.

as always, i immerse myself in any book that i read. after i finally put down this one, i thought to myself what if, what if it happened to me? would i have liked it? is it a disadvantage? if it were an illness and i had it, would i be happy with it, having the chance to know all that i don't and the chance of bringing back future thoughts, would i want it?

tough question. good book. smart author. hope she writes something else with less love and sex. :-)