The wife of the time traveler
The wife of the time traveler ( The Time Traveler's Wife ) is a published in 2003 novel of the American author Audrey Niffenegger . The novel tells an unconventional love story about a man with a rare genetic defect that means that he has to spontaneously travel through time. During his time travel he met a little girl whose life he accompanied from then on and who then also became his wife. The novel was made into a film in 2009 .
action
The novel is about Henry DeTamble (born 1963) and his wife Clare Abshire (born 1971). Henry suffers from a rare genetic defect known as “ chrono impairment ”, which forces him to spontaneously travel through time over and over again. He cannot influence this effect, but he seems to be bound by his unconscious , since he mostly ends up in places where he has already been or which he will come to. Many common things like stress can trigger Henry's time travel. The book describes similarities between the disease and epilepsy .
Henry can't take anything with him on his travels, even the fillings in his teeth disappear. He always arrives at his destination naked, so he has to look for clothes or food for most of his travels. By appearing immediately, he often runs into problems with the police or thugs who believe they have made an easy target. He has mastered a number of useful survival tricks, such as breaking doors and locks as well as various combat and self - defense skills . He learned some of these from some of his older selves when he met them on his travels.
Clare Abshire comes from a wealthy family, attended a Catholic school and became an artist after studying the arts .
Henry travels several times in Clare's childhood and adolescence. On his first visits in her childhood, he gives her a list of all upcoming meetings. This means that Clare can always be at her meeting point - a small, hidden clearing near Clare's parents' house - in good time. Henry's last visit on the list is on Clare's 18th birthday. After two years of abstinence, she finally met Henry in his "normal time" while working at the Newberry Library .
During this encounter - Clare was 20 at the time and Henry 28 years old (1991) - the latter did not recognize her, although she had met him all through her childhood. At the same time, Henry begins to travel to Clare's childhood and live with her in normal time. The future cannot be changed and many tragic events have already emerged in the past.
Clare and Henry get married but have trouble having a child. Clare has multiple miscarriages and is at risk of bleeding to death each time . (The embryo or fetus disappears from the uterus due to premature time travel, and on return the blood vessels do not reconnect on their own.) So Henry decides to have a vasectomy performed . Some time later she becomes pregnant by a Henry who has traveled from the past. They have a daughter, Alba. Shortly before Alba's birth, Henry travels into the future and meets ten-year-old Alba. He learns from her that she has the same genetic defect as himself and that he will die when she is five years old.
A few years later, Henry travels to Chicago in a particularly cold winter , but he cannot find any clothes and does not return home immediately. Because of severe frostbite , both feet have to be amputated , which plunges him into a deep life crisis. Henry has always identified himself through running and loses his zest for life in the first months after the amputation. He is completely emaciated from time travel and the constant attempts to cure him genetically. Plus, he knows he's going to die soon and is emotionally closed with life.
On New Year's Eve, almost a year after the amputation, he travels through time again, but now without feet, and ends up in the Michigan forests during the hunting season. Here he is shot by Clare's brother or father (precisely this is not said) who thinks he is an animal. When he travels back, he is very weak and dies in Clare's arms.
Clare is desperate and no longer feels able to go on living. But she finds a letter from Henry in which he writes that he will meet Clare again, in her future, when she is already old. Clare decides to move on and meets Henry again when she is 82 (Henry is 43). Just as Clare had to see his death through an injury - so too Henry has to see his wife die through old age.
expenditure
- English Original: Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife. ISBN 978-0-15-602943-8 (several editions)
- German translation by Brigitte Jakobeit: Audrey Niffenegger: The woman of the time traveler (hardcover) 832 pages. Verlag S. Fischer, ISBN 978-3-596-50983-6 (several editions)
- German audio book edition: Audrey Niffenegger: The wife of the time traveler. Read by Ulrich Noethen and Maja Schöne, Argon Verlag , ISBN 978-3-86610-963-6 , to be published on October 28, 2009
filming
New Line Cinema in 2009 filmed The wife of the time traveler (The Time Traveler's Wife) . The German theatrical release was September 17, 2009. The film opened on August 14, 2009 in the USA. The film adaptation with Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams is directed by Robert Schwentke .
criticism
“An absolutely splendid book that you can only touch in the table of contents, because otherwise you inevitably come from stick to stick and at some point you can no longer understand anything ... The novel moves roughly in a triangle between the books by Elizabeth Hand, Ken Grimwood's adorable novel Replay and Obsessed with Antonia Byatt . You could see it as genre fiction and publish it as such, but there's more to it. About the way Byatt's novel deals with the fantastic, but is not fantastic in the usual sense, it is also here: science fiction and yet more than just that. "
literature
- Lars Schmeink: Hybrid Texts. Genre transgression at Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife and Gibsons Pattern Recognition . In: Quarber Merkur 111, ed. by Franz Rottensteiner , Gießen 2010, pp. 111-134. ISBN 978-3-934273-90-0
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Fleming, Dave McNary: New Line finds its cast on 'Time' , Variety . April 17, 2007. Retrieved April 18, 2007.