TranscendingTime | Book Shelf

"I met Clare for the first time in October, 1991. She met me for the first time in September, 1977; she was six, I will be thirty-eight. She's known me all her life. In 1991 I'm just getting to know her."

A combination of two interesting topics–love and time travel, The Time Traveller's Wife is a story of a tangled, ill-fated relationship that lingers on in the hearts of its readers. Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel tells the story of Henry DeTamble, born in 1963, and Clare Abshire, born in 1971. When they first met, she was six years old, while he was 36 and time-travelling. Henry has a very rare genetic disorder known as "Chrono-displacement" (created by the writer) that causes him to time travel involuntarily. He is unable to control when he leaves, where he goes, and for how long he disappears. But most his destinations are often related to his subconscious as he travels to places he has been to or will eventually visit.

In one such time travelling journey, Henry visits Clare, who is still a child. His visits begin in 1977 and every time he visits, they have a secret rendezvous in the meadow before her parents' house. Sometimes he appears as a young chap in his late twenties, and sometimes as a mature middle-aged man with graying hair. His last visit takes place on her eighteenth birthday, until they finally meet in real time for both of them two years later, when she is 20 and he is 28.

Though the story revolves around Henry's out of the ordinary ability, their fears, frustrations and struggles are common to us all and can be empathised with. Henry cannot take anything with him into the future or the past. He always "arrives" naked and has to turn to pick-pocketing and fighting- survival skills he picked up during his travelling adventures to feed and clothe himself so as to avoid getting beaten up or arrested. Clare, on the other hand, has to get accustomed to his sudden disappearances. She never knows when she will find a pile of clothes on the floor or hear a moan outside her studio which comes from Henry on his hands, naked and bleeding. When he disappears she doesn't know when she will see them again. Even with such a strange occurrence their life together has a sense of normalcy; on Henry's return he tells Clare where he's been just as other husbands tell their wives what dreams they had the previous night.

The book reads like a diary and is told in first-person narration by both Henry and Clare making it easy to see their lives in both perspectives. Do take note of the dates and the ages of both protagonists before each section. The book is structured in complex chronology and can get confusing.

Reading this book feels like being a part of their life, for author goes into minute details about her two central characters' lives. Their love, built over a lifetime, transcends time and death and by the end you feel the love they have felt and share their joy as well as suffer in their PAIN.