How is time travel "normalized"? How does the author make the time travel "work" and be believable? What do you think about the love relationship? How does this compare with other time travel books?We had some discrepancy among us, some of us loved the book and some didn’t. The idea of an “old” man relating to a young child was highly problematic for some of us. For those of us who were reading it a second time, we paid more attention to the things Henry was doing to not get intimate with Clare when she was a child, of course, then we also noticed that she seemed quite obsessed with sex at a young age! Also, because Henry knows this is the woman he will marry, we seemed to be able to forgive the age difference more.
We helped each other understand some of the scenes that weren’t clear or didn’t make sense: Henry’s death in the woods, Ingrid’s suicide, the wedding, the miscarriages, and Christmas dinner. When you listened to the CD or tape, it was an abridged version and some scenes were missing: 9/11, the suicide.
We talked a lot about the time loops, time travel, and “what if” this could really happen. Stephen J. Hawkins has said that time travel will NEVER happen, because if it did, it would be happening right now – we’d be visited by time travelers from the future.
We compared how other books (and films) have done time travel. Here’s just a sampling of some of the things that came up. The Terminator also has folks traveling naked – can’t take anything with you. But the Magic Tree House books and Octavia Butler’s book Kindred have characters who can take all sorts of stuff with them. It seems Henry needed to have visited or know about a place in order for him to go there (and to have some stress in his life to trigger the time travel, which leads us to believe he could have probably controlled it more than he did). The DNAgers said an incantation and were sent into the body of an ancestor (whose own essence was then put into a “limbo”). The main character from the Butterfly Effect had to look at his journals (or home movies) and then he went to himself at another age and changed things (and that self experienced it as a “black out”). The idea of whether things really change or can be changed (the picture with or without the date on it) seems to be pivotal in time travel books. In this one, anything Henry does seems to have been “meant to be” like winning the lottery.
In our time travel discussion, we all love the “reveal,” also know as the “cage scene.” Seeing TWO Henrys certainly proves the point.
We acknowledge that if this was a reality (time travel was really possible AND people knew about it), that Henry would have been tested and studied, or some wacko cult would have followed him, but in essence, he would have lost control of his life.
It was pretty amazing how the author “normalized” his time travel, as well as how Clare took it all “like a good wife.”
We considered where the time loop didn’t seem to make sense. At the end, when Henry and Alba are in the museum and she talks about time travel and the genes and such, how come she doesn’t mention other time travelers she’s met? Wouldn’t that be happening? Are she and Henry still the only ones? It just seems there could have been a little more conversation from her to inform us of all those “gene infected time travelers she has met.”
The ending was disappointing. Clare didn’t seem to really “move on,” just like Henry’s father (after his mother’s death). Could that be an analogy for real life – we all repeat “loops” and do things we know aren’t good for us.
Here is a nice review by Dona Patrick
This book is breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad. However it is uplifting and I am envious of the love these two characters have for each other. The author writes it in such a way that the time-travel part of the story is believable.
I had a slightly difficult time with the ending, not the very ending, but what happened to Henry in the year before the book ended. The book was like a pleasant ride on a mild roller coaster, and suddenly it became, for a while, a jarring walk through an evil carnival fun house.
One last thing I liked about the book was the fact that many place names were real. I recently spoke to someone who said that she even went to some of the concerts mentioned in the book.
It is hard to believe that this is Audrey Niffenegger's first book. It is nearly perfect in every detail. I read an interview with the author that suggested she wrote the book in a different order than in which it was published.
I got the title first, and played around with it for quite a long time, slowly evolving the characters in my head. I wrote the end before anything else, and then began to write scenes as they occurred to me. TTW was written in a completely different order than the one it finally took. I understood early on that it would be organized in three sections, and that the basic unit was the scene, not the chapter. It has a rather chaotic feel to it, especially at the beginning, and that is deliberate-there is a slow piecing together, a gradual accumulation of story, that mimics the experience of the characters. I made a lot of notes about the characters. I had two timelines to help me stay organized, but no outline of the plot.
Questions from another website
1. In The Time Traveler's Wife, the characters meet each other at various times during their lifetime. How does the author keep all the timelines in order and "on time"?
2. Although Henry does the time traveling, Clare is equally impacted. How does she cope with his journeys and does she ultimately accept them?
3. How does the writer introduce the reader to the concept of time travel as a realistic occurrence? Does she succeed?
4. Henry's life is disrupted on multiple levels by spontaneous time travel. How does his career as a librarian offset his tumultuous disappearances? Why does that job appeal to Henry?
5. Henry and Clare know each other for years before they fall in love as adults. How does Clare cope with the knowledge that at a young age she knows that Henry is the man she will eventually marry?
6. The Time Traveler's Wife is ultimately an enduring love story. What trials and tribulations do Henry and Clare face that are the same as or different from other "normal" relationships?
7. How does their desire for a child affect their relationship?
8. The book is told from both Henry and Clare's perspectives. What does this add to the story?
9. Do you think the ending of the novel is satisfactory?
10. Though history there have been dozens of mediums used for time travel in literature. Please cite examples and compare The Time Traveler's Wife to the ones with which you are familiar.
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