If You Liked: The Time Traveler's Wife

Then You'll Also Like
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Although one of these books involves actual time traveling and the other does not, you’ll find that they have the same effect. If you enjoyed the excitingly haphazard construction of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife--never knowing quite what will happen next—you’re sure to get sucked into the bizarre world of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. Henry and Clare’s life of unpredictability and confusion is mirrored, although in quite a different way, in the existence of two sisters, Laura and Iris, who never could quite understand one another. The most important characteristic, and what makes each of these novels work, is the purposeful guidance the reader experiences, without even realizing it as the stories are written out of order with numerous interruptions. When at first the placement of events may seem chaotic, they are really carefully and intricately woven in just the right way.

While Niffenegger fills the bill by consistently letting you know age and time and place, Atwood creates the same affect by combining the main plot line with news articles, remembrances, and exotic and violent novellas. Each requires the mind to work out of sync, which will leave you reeling with endless possibilities. So if you liked The Time Traveler’s Wife, try out The Blind Assassin!

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Unfortunately, I did not feel like this book lived up to my expectations. In fact, at some points, I think a much stronger word than "disappointed" would be appropriate, but I'll stick with that for now.

First of all, I think Niffenegger's idea was extremely creative--not one I would ever have thought of. And the plot, as it twists and turns through time, I thought, was really quite amazing. I have to give her major points on that one. It also got me thinking about how cool it would be to go back in time and have a little chat with my husband as a six year old. I would love that. =)

However, I got very tired, very quickly, of the author's reliance on eroticism as a source of describing Clare and Henry's love for each other. This bothers me because I feel like +/-

it's a very weak thing to rely on, in entirety, to describe love in it's deepest form. Honestly, I didn't see what it added to the plot or the character development. And, closely linked with it, I found a few of her comparisons/jokes (i.e., "not quite Auschwitz-skinny") to be in poor taste.

The other thing I found disappointing about the novel was the character development. I didn't feel like the characters had separate, distinct voices. Sometimes, if I wasn't paying close enough attention, I would forget who was speaking, and have to flip back and look, because Clare and Henry were interchangable. I felt the other characters were also mostly this way (meaning Clare and Henry's friends and relatives). I know it's good for an author to write what he or she knows; apparently our author was very versed in punk rock parties! But, I felt she could have branched out with her characters a little, and that she should have done so. Although there are a few exceptions, for the most part, I felt that all the characters were more or less the same person, just with a different name. It made the story fall somewhat flat, I felt.

But, it wasn't all bad. I felt that the end of the book was very moving. I felt like she illustrated that horrific prospect of seemingly endless separation with such emotion and insight, it would be very difficult not to be moved by it. The theme of "waiting" was certainly explored in the most creative way I have ever seen. I felt like I got inside that kind of longing, frustration, and despair. That feeling of expectation, and then knowing that it can't last forever. I think everyone wishes, at some point in life, that they could bottle a happy moment and keep reliving it without ever letting that moment slip away.

Although chrono-displacement disorder (or whatever it was called) is a ficitional disease, there are lots of diseases that people have to cope with that cause similar emotional responses and frustrations. I can't imagine what that would be like. Niffenegger showed me exactly what that would feel like, and it was devastating. It was heart-wrenching for me to see that from the inside. And it got me thinking about what I would do and how I would react, how I would cope.

For these reasons, I'm glad I read the book, but I didn't feel like it made my "must read" list and I wouldn't recommend it.

BC About the Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist who lives in Chicago. She is a professor in the Interdis- ciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches writing, letter- press printing, and fine edition book production. She is the founding member of T3, an artist and writer's group that performs and exhibits in Chicago. Her interests include collecting taxi- dermy and reading comic books.

Audrey’s love of writing developed when she was a young girl, quietly spending her time writing and illustrating books as a hobby. Her wonderfully eccentric imaginativeness was in play from her earliest writing efforts. "My 'first' novel was an epic about an imaginary road trip I went on with The Beatles," she explains on her website, "handwritten in turquoise marker, seventy pages long, which I wrote and illustrated when I was eleven." +/-

Audrey’s mini-magical mystery tour may have been her "first novel," but the first one to which the rest of the world would be privy came many years later. She had already established herself as a prominent artist whose work had been shown in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University when The Time Traveler's Wife was published in 2003.

She says about the book, "I wanted to write a book about waiting. The Time Traveler's Wife is dedicated to my maternal grandparents, Elizabeth and Norbert Tamandl. My grandfather died very young, and very suddenly, of a brain tumor. I never met him. My grandmother never remarried. By all accounts, my grandparents were very happy together. My grandmother outlived her husband by almost thirty years. I wanted to write about a perfect marriage that is tested by something outside the control of the couple. The title came to me out of the blue, and from the title sprang the characters, and from the characters came the story.” A film version, starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, is due for release in 2010.

Now that she had established herself as a talent to watch, Audrey finally had the opportunity to produce a book she would describe as "a fourteen-year labor of love." Three Incestuous Sisters: An Illustrated Novel, is a gorgeous, modern-gothic storybook about the love and rivalry shared between three women. With its minimal text, Audrey’s chiefly uses her eerie illustrations to convey the sisters' story.

Audrey’s next novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, is due out this fall. "It's set in London's Highgate Cemetery, and features as many of the clichés of 19th century fiction as I can summon." Amazingly, with such a wide variety of styles in her still budding body of work—from science fiction to fairy tale to her impending period piece—Audrey Niffenegger's books still share a strong sense of unity, a distinctly peculiar and particular vision. "The thing that unites all my work is narrative. I'm interested in telling stories, and I'm interested in creating a world that's recognizable to us as ours, but is filled with strangeness and slight changes in the rules of the universe."

Visit her website here.