"Life is a Roller Coaster"

Eventually I finished the book in the afternoon, as I was coming home from my afternoon class. This is a nice example of when you have so much to say that it's hard to say anything at all. When I finished it I thought that this is a 500-page-long love letter, a life in print, a secret world in a book. It really feels like in those novels when the reader becomes the protagonist (e.g. The Neverending Story or Sophie's World), and I do want to be part of it, even though it is so sad. I've been thinking about it ever since, caressing the book, carrying it as if I had a secret with me. I don't think I could ever feel like this with an ebook reader.

Compared to the film it is much richer, if not deeper. First of all, there are all these important quotes inserted, ranging from the Odyssey through Rilke to A. S. Byatt's Possession, which I'm actually planning to read inspired by this book. As I probably said earlier, I feel that there is a careful and clever planning and arranging behind this book, and all the pages have an added value, and this is especially true for the quotes. In fact, they fit in so well that they feel as if they'd been written by the author herself to build in her book. Another thing it tells me is that we have a devoted and well-read booklover here, and I think it is similar to cooking, i.e. I wouldn't eat the food made by someone who doesn't like eating. I am of the old-fashioned view that things should be done as a form of art, originating from love, amazement, and humility. Just as it is said of Henry's father, the violinist, that he respects every piece of art and plays every music as if he truly loved it, even if he doesn't. I know from experience that that makes all the difference.
I think the personality of Clare and Henry are also much more elaborated in the book than in the film, though I accept that these are different forms of art with different sets of techniques. If I may make guesses, I think it is Henry we first fall for, seen through the eyes of Clare, of course. I mean, here is this guy who works as a librarian, speaks French and German, cooks brilliantly, listens to cool music, is good in bed - what else is there to wish for? Many of his features actually remind me of my boyfriend, except that he would never listen to punk, go clubbing, or take drugs. Henry remains a puzzle for me because for me the shift from young selfish Henry to the loving and faithful husband was a bit unmotivated, I mean, if we don't settle with the explanation that Clare has such influence on him. (Of course a relationship is always about becoming a better person next to the loved one, if not it might as well end since there's no point in it.) With Clare the image that remains is that of the receiver, the forgiver, the redeemer. She practically spends her young life hoping for an encounter, then when they are married, worrying and somehow excluded.
Although many labelled it a love story, which title implies something silly and light for me, there is something inherently sad about it. As I already said referring to the film, this story captures a universal experience, many experiences for that matter, including experiences of longing, belonging, feeling excluded, struggling, and often joy, and often pain. Time becomes a philosophical subject matter, though not so evidentially as in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. For one thing, time is conceptualized as something folded or spirallic, meaning that the events are recurring, and the terms of past, present, and future are not important in the long run. Time and the course of events are also unchangeable and somehow determined, though we don't know by whom or what. Within this universal determinism time is also a personal experience, if we consider that the very same thing can belong to Clare's past and Henry's future. Determination is questionable here because sometimes it feels that Henry won't lift a finger to try and change something, but in other cases, such as his mother's death, he is clearly helpless. Yet other episodes evoke the typical outcome of ancient Greek tragedies, namely that by trying to prevent a future event we make it happen. And let me just add here for the sake of skepticists that time travel is not far from everyday experience. Or what do you call it when you replay your first kiss or anything over and over again. As Clare says somewhere near the end, she also becomes "a time traveler", of another sort.
If we take the story as a biography (or memoir), it is worth examining which elements of this life are included. It is even truer if we accept Henry's theory that his time travel follows a pattern similar to gravitation, in the sense that he tends to revisit certain places, events, and people in time, who are of special importance to him. What are these points of reference in his life? Well, certainly Clare, her mother, and even the library where he works. I wonder which elements my clock gene (my narrator) would choose.
The narration was also interesting to me. First of all because of the unchronological sequencing, though I felt that Clare's part was more or less chronological, and many events were revisited towards the end of the book which happened during their married life but belonged to Clare's past, because they happened to Henry when he was at that parrticular age in real time. The story was told in first person singular throughout, but the narration shifted from Clare to Henry and vice versa. I think that feature is also in accordance with the real life experience of two people always seeing the same thing from different perspectives (both literally and idiomatically). The characters both had a voice of their own, with Clare being feminine, tender, and somehow motherly (or wifish?), and Henry (trying to be) masculine, with lots of slang, occasional swearing, and machoism. And don't forget humor of course. Here we have a couple who admit having (and enjoying) sex and referring to "cock" and "clit" and what not, which sounds much more realistic and far less pretentious than what we usually get in a "love story."
There is a caption on the cover which disturbs me, saying that "Here's the next Lovely Bones." I probably have mentioned before that I just hate these comparisons because it sounds as if the book was an imitation of something (more) original. It is even more disturbing when I don't see the connection or find it far-fetched. But if you want to know, here are the books and films that popped into my mind reading it: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, P.S. I love you, The English Patient (different kind of time travel), the Odyssey (it is often mentioned in the book as well), and that's all I can recall just now. And though the list might be continued, I think that The Time Traveler's Wife is a lot of books and something strikingly original at the same time.

P.S. I hope I haven't spoiled it for you. I'm going to add some nice quotes and a list of useful vocab as well at a more convenient time.
P.P.S. There's not much space left on my English shelf, not much in the bookcase either, and I already had to remove my Jane Austin reader to make room for this one (placing it among Hungarian anthologies and high school literature textbooks), so I think I should stop adding to my collection for a while and just be sensible and borrow from the library. No money for that anyway.