Ramblings & The Time Traveller's Wife

I'm back. I could rattle on about how pissed off I am with my work but I won't. Suffice it to say that Croatia is a nice place to be as long as you don't expect anyone, in the work environment, to be organised. There are very many first class engineers, technicians etc. in this country but there seems not to be the requisite number of good project managers, at least not around the job I am involved in.

But (Can you start a paragraph with 'But'?) I have decided that this blog will have nothing to do with my work, rather it will be somewhere I can come to get away from work. So, what to write about? Well the obvious thing to reflect on just now is how badly I am prepared for the first Tutor Marked Assessment which I will have to submit to the Open University. This is solely because of my work (sorry) commitments and I am seriously questioning whether I have bitten off more than I can chew. On the other hand I can hang in and force myself to get it done and hope for the best. We'll see.

But books! Now there's another thing. I have just finished reading The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I can't praise this book highly enough. I am not an enthusiast of science fiction or fantasy. I like stories which are strongly character driven but also rooted in the real world. I can thus identify with and/or empathise with the people in the story. This was something different. A perfectly laid out narrative told in the first person by the two central characters, Henry the librarian time-traveller and Clare, who he meets when she is six years old and he has travelled back in time from a point in the future when he is already married to her. When he meets her in real time, when Clare is twenty and he is twenty eight, he has not yet travelled back to her childhood so he does not recognise her. She, however, recognises him and the story of their relationship develops from this point. The time travel aspects are so logically laid out that you are never confused and therefore you can concentrate on the lives and relationships of the central characters. I will quote one reviewer from the Amazon.com website

".... the story is written so well, so touching, so heart-breaking at parts, so loving. Reading this novel was such a joy for all the emotions it made me feel. Most books published nowadays just do not do that to me. This one made me feel. And it was such a great reading experience. What all great books are made of. Wonderful."

I could not agree more. Look forward to Ms. Niffenegger's next book with keen anticipation. If her creative talents are not all expended by this tour de force then we should be in for another treat.