The Time Traveler's Wife: not a review

Yesterday I borrowed The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger from the library. I’m hardly on page 100 by now, and I’m already making plans about whom I am going to give it to for their birthday.

During this first half of 2009, reading has been a painful experience. I already mentioned last week that I’ve been suffering some kind of reader’s block for a long time. It seemed to have gone away late in 2008, when I managed to read several books in a row (my favourite being The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), but in 2009 I’ve already started and given up three others: my “Oh no, I’ve smoked again” moments.

Big part of the problem is my limited ability to choose what to read. There isn’t really much of a library at home, and for now buying books comes below the cutoff line in the budget, so I’m left to sticking to public libraries: it’s really sad to get all excited about a certain book in Goodreads or LibraryThing, and then check that it’s not available in any of the libraries around here. (It doesn’t really help that I insist on reading in English now, in a country where that’s even more uninteresting than undubbed movies. Then there’s the pain that I’m not a fast reader anymore, and the clock ticks.)

Anyway, let’s get back to this non-review of The Time Traveler’s Wife, since the above should sort itself out soon. Imagine, coming from where I come from on this, how empowering it feels to say, a couple tens of pages into a book, this book, to say: “I’m so going to finish it.” (Well, any book can turn out bad, but I’m quite confident this one won’t.) It was a really great feeling.

This book is obviously science-fiction, since it involves time travelling, but I think that’s a wrong label for it since it’s just a love story. One that, precisely because it involves a component one doesn’t normally find in regular love stories (time travelling), becomes such a powerful one: the characters experience situations in a relationship your brain had never conceived, like for example the whole Jason incident, and that’s been for me incredibly moving. (I guess if you’re well into time-travelling stories, you might have thought of such situations. And there are probably some science-fictions books out there that have presented some of them already.)

If you’re thinking of reading this book, and particularly if you’re a regular science-fiction reader, I’m tempted to suggest —with only 100 pages into it, beware!— that you don’t see it as a science-fiction book. Try not to derail into analyzing if the travelling is consistent (which I’ve found it to be), or if the presented philosophy makes sense. For me it’s a book about emotions, and the time travelling is the device that allows us to achieve some very high peaks.

By the way, as far as I can tell, this is going to be the first time ever I’m going to watch a movie after having read the novel, and not the other way around. Let’s see how disappointed I will be!

P.S.: I’ve recently passed one of the three courses I had set out to pass when I went VAC, yay! Only two to go.