Featured Reading Guide
Audrey Niffenegger
This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. His disappearances are spontaneous and his experiences are alternately harrowing and amusing. The Time Traveler’s Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare’s passionate love for…
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Audrey Niffenegger is an exceptionally creative writer and visual artist who has achieved enormous success in both worlds. Her debut novel, The Time Traveler s Wife , has sold nearly five million copies worldwide and has been translated into thirty-three languages to date. A Richard & Judy book club choice in the UK, it has been a huge bestseller all round the world. In the Daily Telegraph s readers poll of the Top 50 Books of All Time it appeared at no. 11. Niffenegger is also the author of two novels-in-pictures , The Three Incestuous Sisters (2005) and The Adventuress (2006), both published by Jonathan Cape. Her graphic novel The Night Bookmobile was recently serialized in the Guardian and will be published soon on the Cape Graphic list. A Chicago native, Niffenegger received her MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from Northwestern University. Her art has been widely exhibited in the United States and is in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress and Harvard University s Houghton Library.
topAbout the Book
This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. His disappearances are spontaneous and his experiences are alternately harrowing and amusing. The Time Traveler’s Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare’s passionate love for each other with grace and humour. Their struggle to lead normal lives in the face of a force they can neither prevent nor control is intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.
topAudrey Niffenegger interview/review
An extract from the interview Audrey Niffenegger: Woman on the edge of time, January 2004:
Henry travels back to Clare’s childhood throughout the novel. “That’s the thing that’s potent for people, I think,” says Niffenegger. “The idea of visiting your wife’s childhood. That’s a big, big thrill.” Clare first meets a thirtysomething Henry as a six-year-old, when he falls naked into her favourite hiding spot on her family’s estate.
Part three is entitled ‘A Treatise on Longing’, a name that would work for the entire book. Clare spends her early adulthood waiting for the mysterious Henry who dropped in and out of the formative periods of her life, as he has told her that in the future they are married. And then, when she and Henry finally meet in Chicago and fall in love, she spends more time waiting. He suddenly disappears who knows where to return sometimes weeks later. She is like Penelope holding tight for the return of her Odysseus, her ‘time travelling artist’.
Niffenegger says she entitled her love story The Time Traveler’s Wife, and not The Time Traveler, because of the epigraph by J.B. Priestley from Man and Time. It reads: ‘Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector, police inspector; this inner time is our wife.’
“That’s actually what the title, for me, really means,” she says. “The book itself is really about the marriage. Henry is not only married to Clare; he’s also married to time.” But if Henry is married to time, then Clare is time’s widow, fated to live according to another’s clock.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Despite the tear-jerking and heart-wrenching nature of the story, did you find the novel was also positive and uplifting in some way? Or did you find it unremittingly bleak?
- Do you think Niffenegger is trying to get across any kind of message by playing with our linear sense of time in the way that she does?
- Did you have any problems with Henry and Clare’s relationship? Are there any points in the story where you dislike either of their characters?
- What did you make of Niffenegger’s unusual narrative structure?
- ‘His forty-third year. His small time’s end. His time – Who saw Infinity through the countless cracks in the blank skin of things, and died of it.’(A.S. Byatt, Possession, quoted on page 494). Consider Niffenegger’s use of quotations and epigrams throughout the book. What do they add to the novel, and what do you find significant about this one in particular?
- To what extent do you believe in Henry’s time travelling? Does it ever seem unconvincing to you, or do you think Niffenegger manages to keep us with her throughout?
Other Books by Audrey Niffenegger
Her Fearful Symmetry
At last —-another brilliant, original and moving novel from the author of THE…
The Adventuress
The follow-up to the lyrical, haunting novel-in-pictures The Three Incestuous…
The Three Incestuous Sisters…
Before she wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife , now a bestseller all around the…
The Time Traveler’s Wife
This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have …
Suggested Further Reading
- The Lovely Bones ~ Alice Sebold
- Possession ~ A.S. Byatt
- The Amber Spyglass ~ Philip Pullman
- The Amateur Marriage ~ Anne Tyler