"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through." --Virginia Woolf
Friday, December 31, 2004
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
I always give fiction published by MacAdam-Cage a chance, and this is a clever book. It made for an excellent airplane read (am I the only person who worries about choosing books to read on airplanes that don't make me look common --c'mon you know what I mean-- but also don't make me look pompous?). The hook--husband can't help but time travel--naked--at unexpected moments--puts tension into every scene. You never know when he's going to disappear or show up and how he's going to cope with not having any clothes, so there is a physical threat at even the most ordinary moments. I flew through this book wondering what would happen, and yet it's in many ways a conventional romance. The events are basically dates, wedding, difficulty getting pregnant--the author has just found a way to make them fresh. The thing is I read this book only a week ago and I remember almost nothing from it. Essentially it's an engagingly-written, plot-driven read. If Niffenegger had paid a little more attention to character-development, I think it would have been the kind of book I want to reread every few years; as it is, I probably won't keep my copy for long. Good book to learn about tension from, though.
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2 comments:
Thanks for the reviews! Always nice to have more recommendations of what to read next. Please keep it up.
it seems like i read somewhere that brad pitt will play the husband in the movie version . . . i suppose that will take care of character development issues!
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