I am the time traveler. As I turn the page and walk through time, I feel my emotions surge and fall. I’ve been through all this before, but I am powerless to stop it as I enter each scene, embrace each emotion, soak up the powerful words and bathe in its beauty. I turn the page and walk through time, and the cycle repeats. I am powerless against it.
I am reading, for the second time, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger. I first heard of it during World Youth Day. Shampoo was telling me over a smoke and a martini how she finally convinced Wind to read it. A few weeks ago, I borrowed it from her and downed it in two days.
For the first time since I read “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, I found myself curled up in bed and reading non-stop till the wee hours in the morning. I finished that book in 12 hours, on the same day it was released. Nutella had finished it in 11 hours. She reads faster than I do.
Few things I find more enjoyable than being in bed, totally absorbed in a good book, transported to another reality, another world. The words of a good book does that for me. It brings me into another time, another place, the way a good movie can sometimes do.
But a good book surpasses the capability of a good movie, because good writers can paint a scenario in my mind better than a good director can show me. I have a mind for detail and I appreciate the descriptive language that a good movie can never replicate… although I thought Rowling overkilled the descriptions in “Deathly Hallows”, breaking the flow of the story at times.
Niffenegger uses French and German on occasion, forcing me to skip several parts as though I am leaping through time, but what I don’t understand, I don’t miss.
This second time round, I am the time traveler. I know what’s coming, and I know I can do nothing to change it. All I can do is to appreciate it. I note the references to the end. I observe the little pieces fall into place. I see things that I missed the first time round. For some hours each day, I am in another world – the world of the time traveler and his wife.
Filed under: Books
