Not long ago I was surfing through HBO Max looking for something to watch. One of the series it suggested for me was The Time Traveler’s Wife. It looked very interesting to me, so I added it to my list. But I knew this was a book before it became a TV series. As I generally prefer to read the book first, I held off from starting the series.
The Time Traveler’s Wife was a book that I had heard of before. I’d even thought about reading it a few times. The idea of a man who travels involuntarily through time married to a woman who meets him first as a child was mildly interesting to me, but I never got around to reading it. When I asked my partner if she had read it, she had and liked it. She is tough on books; they have to be very good for her to like them more than “meh”. So I decided to read this one. All I can say is WOW!
This is one of my favorite books that I have ever read. I am at a complete loss to how it could even have been written. The author switches between the perspectives of the husband and the wife. The husband jumps around in time so he meets his future wife when he is around forty and she is seven. In chronological time, they don’t meet until he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. So the first time he meets her (chronologically), she knows him but he has never seen her before. And the author does this so easily, keeping the reader connected with the characters and the story the whole time. So beautifully written with such a challenging format to storytelling.
And the book covers the themes of human life — sex, love, illness, children, relationships, jealousy. Each of these themes is addressed in the course of the events of the story. No heavy-handedness. It all feels so natural and real despite the science fiction aspect of the time travel. The reality of the story and its emotions touched me deeply. I laughed out loud, and I cried. I was almost sorry to get to the end of it. And now, I can’t wait to watch the TV series!
One thought on “Masterful Storytelling”