The Time Traveller's Wife

One of the things that I really wish I'd given a higher priority too is keeping my book blog up to date.  Not that I read all that much these days.  I always seem to have much higher priorities for my time: an incomprehensible statement for people like CJ and many of my friends.  Add to that the fact that I'm a very slow reader and the problem shouldn't be so big.  One of the problems in not keeping it up to date is that I often just cannot recall the ins and outs of books I have read over the last few years even though I have a reasonable recollection (leastways I think I do) of books I read when I was in my early 20s.

One book I've been trying to read is The Time Traveller's Wife , Audrey Niffenegger's début novel.  I started it several years ago and it's travelled back and forth between Scotland and New Zealand several times but despite many attempts and re-starts (several from the beginning) I've never got past half-way.  Last year I attempted to watch the film but even that defeated me and I didn't get past the first half hour.  I don't even know why I found it so hard to cope with.  Yesterday, however, I had a breakthrough:  I watched the film to the end.  

There might be a few amongst you you have not read the novel nor seen the film.  For you here is a synopsis of the basis of the book:

Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Henry DeTamble (born 1963), a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and his wife, Clare Anne Abshire (born 1971), an artist who makes paper sculptures. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which comes to be known as Chrono-Displacement, that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library in 1991 at the opening of the novel, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life.

The book, though a huge sales success on publication in 2003, did not receive the rave reviews that might have been expected with some criticism of its pedestrian writing and style and sometimes contrived though clever plot.  In general, the film received mixed-to-negative reviews. For example, The New York Times wrote that the film was an "often ridiculous, awkward, unsatisfying and dour melodramatic adaptation".  I had never read any reviews until I came to write this post (or if I had I've completely forgotten).  Perhaps sub-consciously I just didn't find the book satisfying.

Maybe now that I've seen the film I can one day watch it again so that I can appreciate all the bits I didn't take in and perhaps, just perhaps, I will have another go at the book.  It's one that I feel I ought to have mastered.