This weekend, I read Her Fearful Symmetry, but Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. I haven’t read The Time Traveler’s Wife, and wasn’t intending to read Her Fearful Symmetry, but I heard so many rave reviews, I decided to att it to my requests list at my local library, expecting to have to wait months; instead, I picked the book up two days after it had been released.
Here’s how the Publisher’s Website described the novel:
Julia and Valentina Poole are semi-normal American twenty-year-olds with seemingly little interest in college or finding jobs. Their attachment to one another is intense. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. From a London solicitor, the enclosed letter informs Valentina and Julia that their English aunt Elspeth Noblin, whom they never knew, has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions to this inheritance: that they live in it for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the estranged Elspeth and Edie, their mother.
The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders the vast and ornate Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Radclyffe Hall, Stella Gibbons and Karl Marx are buried. Julia and Valentina come to know the living residents of their building. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword-puzzle setter suffering from crippling obsessive compulsive disorder; Marijke, Martin’s devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt’s neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including — perhaps — their aunt.
After completing Her Fearful Symmetry, I will definitely be reading The Time Traveler’s Wife. Her Fearful Symmetrywas fabulous, wonderful, lyrical, and I cannot say how much I loved it. The lyrical prose exceeded my expectations. So did the idea of the ghost story, which I feel Niffenegger really reinterpreted and took in an entirely new direction than what has been seen before. The plot could have been predictable, but it was delightfully fresh, and one of the twists made my eyes bug out.
Entwined with the story of Julia and Valentina were the stories of the other occupants of their flat building — Robert, Martin and his wife Marijke. We got to hear parts of the story in each of their voices. What Niffenegger accomplished so well in the case of each of her characters was to make the reader care about them and what happened with them. Each of the characters seemed completely real, and even if I didn’t identify with or even like a character, Niffenegger’s skill with character development made me care about their fates.
This novel also delves into what it is like being a twin, and the issues embodied in that. As the granddaughter and great-niece of identical twins, I found this aspect of the novel fascinating. I have lots of questions to ask them now!
This is not a particularly face-paced novel, but its the perfect “get cozy and read” novel. Read it. You will be glued to the edge of your seat and awed by Niffenegger’s prose. I completely, whole-heartedly recommend this one!
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