The Time Traveler’s Wife

　　A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

　　An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.

相遇那年，她6歲，他36歲；
結婚那年，她23歲，他31歲；
離別後再度重逢時，她82歲，他43歲。
在他倆如此詭譎的戀愛大事記裡，
相對於如此真實、強烈的感覺，時間，微不足道。

　　如果生命是一場旅行，亨利的旅程肯定比常人更迂迴且深刻，只因為他罹患了時空錯置失調症，當基因時鐘偶爾重起，他就會不由自主地消失，現身在某段曾經，或即將遭遇的時空場景。不得不一再體驗曾經遭受的經歷，他只能旁觀、重複品味那些快樂、悲傷、痛苦。而與克萊兒的愛，是支撐他的唯一動力。

作者簡介

奧黛麗．尼芬格（Audrey Niffenegger）

　　視覺藝術家，也是芝加哥哥倫比亞學院（Columbia College）書籍和紙藝中心（Center for Book and Paper Arts）跨學科書籍藝術MFA計畫的教授，她負責教導寫作、凸版印刷以及精美版書籍的製作，並曾經在芝加哥的Printworks Gallery展出她的藝術作品，《時空旅人的妻子》是她創作的第一本小說。

本書中譯本《時空旅人之妻》由商周出版。

THE MAN OUT OF TIME



Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss. But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.



... Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? Not the art of looking, which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing. The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness, and the long experience of love,-just what is wholly unsayable. - from The Ninth Duino Elegy, RAINER MARIA RILKE, translated by STEPHEN MITCHELL



FIRST DATE, ONE



Saturday, October 26, 1991 (Henry is 28, Clare is 20)



CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble. I sign the Visitors Log: Clare Abshire, 11:15 10-26-91 Special Collections. I have never been in the Newberry Library before, and now that Ive gotten past the dark, foreboding entrance I am excited. I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books. The elevator is dimly lit, almost silent. I stop on the third floor and fill out an application for a Readers Card, then I go upstairs to Special Collections. My boot heels rap the wooden floor. The room is quiet and crowded, full of solid, heavy tables piled with books and surrounded by readers. Chicago autumn morning light shines through the tall windows. I approach the desk and collect a stack of call slips. Im writing a paper for an art history class. My research topic is the Kelmscott Press Chaucer. I look up the book itself and fill out a call slip for it. But I also want to read about papermaking at Kelmscott. The catalog is confusing. I go back to the desk to ask for help. As I explain to the woman what I am trying to find, she glances over my shoulder at someone passing behind me. ＂Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you,＂ she says. I turn, prepared to start explaining again, and find myself face to face with Henry.