Love in the Asylum – Lisa Carey
Reviewed here.
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Amazing. Fabulous. Wonderful. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius, to borrow an apt phrase. I heartily recommend the audio version as well as the dead tree edition, but not while you’re driving. I nearly went off the road laughing, and I’m really glad that I’d moved on to the paper version by the time I got to the second half. Crying while driving would have been very, very bad.
If you haven’t heard of this book—are you living under a rock?—it’s about a guy who time-travels involuntarily at random moments and, obviously, the woman who marries him. The time thing really screws with his life—imagine, to take the mildest of examples from the book, suddenly disappearing from work, your clothes left in a heap, to find yourself naked in someone else’s house. Good luck explaining what you’re doing or how you got there. Now imagine all the other fun-filled places you might end up… elevator shafts, crowded streets, museums, etc., etc. Poor Henry. All this is balanced out, though, by his very touching visits to his wife during her childhood. This causes a few problems in and of itself; when he meets her for the first time, she’s known an older version of him all her life.
I don’t want to say much more about it because I can’t do it justice. This thing has been optioned for a movie, and I honestly don’t envy the poor screenwriter who has to figure out how to compress this sprawling story. It would be like performing surgery on a loved one.