Character Profile: Clare

At long last, another of our awesome female characters: Clare DeTamble from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (beware: this will contain spoilers though I try to gloss over specific plot points). I have read this book countless times now. In fact, the first time I read it, I closed it, sat for a minute, and then opened it up again to start over. One of the greatest things about Clare as an element of the story is that while so much of the storyline is about Henry, the real factor at play here is the way that they have shaped each other through time and circumstance.

She is the titular character here and the first one that we hear from. The story is written from two viewpoints: Henry, the involuntary time traveler, and Clare, the time traveler's wife. Though Henry's voice is so dominant in the chronicle of their lives it is truly Clare's story that shines through and gives it definition. It's Clare who we follow from youth to adolescence to adulthood with a much greater focus. We get snippets of Henry's past but nothing like a clear picture of his life, really. He travels back and meets her as a young girl and as he begins shaping her life (admittedly in an inadvertently twisted way), she begins to change him in the time that he comes from. Clare teaches Henry to be reliable, or as reliable as he can be. She teaches him to maintain hope through the futility of his life. That's really what this novel is about. It isn't an epic love story. It's a story about the futility of predestination, about reliving memories over and over, about learning from the past even if you don't know if you can change the future.

Henry is the tennis ball in The Time Traveler's Wife, batted back and forth through time, and Clare is his constant. She is the one thing we can depend on in this story. The only times we truly see her fall apart are when they are trying to conceive and when Henry dies. She is a rock not just for Henry but for the reader. We know who she is and we can rely on her to act, for the most part, with wisdom, compassion, and justice. Clare isn't perfect and as I've said before, no good heroine is perfect. If she was, we couldn't aspire to be more like her--she would be out of reach. Clare's biggest flaw is that she spends so much of her time just waiting. She tries to find things to do to fill the time while Henry is gone but she doesn't seek to do them with other people, just by herself. And she goes back and forth between glorying in the freedom and despairing in the loneliness.

Clare is strong and determined with an incredible foresight. So much of the end is left to our imagination but from what I read into Clare, I know this much is true: In spite of defining herself as simply The Time Traveler's Wife, she rises up beyond her relationship with Henry and builds herself a life with her daughter and teaches us that we are not victims of circumstance as long as we pull ourselves above it and move forward.

What I'm Reading: Smoke and Mirrors

Today, caught in the death grip of whatever was wrong with me this morning, I wrapped up Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer (fantastic book that I will talk about later and in Googling, found two sequels that I have just ordered from Amazon) and picked up Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman. I'm likely running the risk of Gaiman-ing out my readers but (shhh, don't tell them) I don't care. I have yet to be unimpressed by his writing which is a really passive way of saying that his writing impresses me. Were I ever to meet him, I would ask him if he knew how great he was. (Side note: If I ever spoke to Patricia Wrede [again], I'd ask the same question.)

So anyway, Smoke and Mirrors is an amalgam of his short stories and a few poems that have been previously published in anthologies and other collections.What I enjoy about this book is that it seems to be a really great representation of the things that have inspired and influenced Gaiman as a writer and professional imagination-man. There are stories here that touch on H.P. Lovecraft and traditional fairy tales and classic horror films but all with Gaiman's personal twist on them. Some are uncomfortable to read but possibly only because I am Minnesotan and discomfort comes easily to me. My only problem with this collection is that when I read the pieces that mention Larry Talbot (the wolfman) by name, I can't help but envision Lon Cheney Jr. in the role, with his perpetually stricken face. Again, more of a personal problem.

I definitely recommend Smoke and Mirrors to anyone who likes a story with a good twist or someone who doesn't have a lot of spare time to read and wants a quick payoff. Short story collections are great for that and this one in particular never fails to deliver.

So here's the blog schedule, as I promised:
Sunday: What I'm Reading
Monday: Character Profile
Wednesday: Quote of the Week
Friday: Author Spotlight

I'll be running occasional polls of authors and characters (though Character Profile days will start with Nancy, Scout, and Clare as promised) and other miscellaneous things. Feel free to comment whenever with requests, suggestions, or anything.

Brainstorming

I'm working on a regular schedule for posts and a list of topics for when I'm feeling uninspired. Sunday will mark the beginning of the new schedule and I'm really excited about it!

Also, you can still expect to see posts about Scout, Clare, and Nancy. Your favorite ladies will be featured here soon.

The First Sunny Day

Our first really nice day of the year was today. I went out today at 2pm and didn't come back in until about 20 minutes ago. I walked down to the Hudson River and sat on a bench. I ate lunch and meant to just sit outside and read. It didn't work out that way. I'm convinced now that if I didn't have to go to work, and could sit outside as long as I wanted to, I would be published by now. Maybe I just need more drive and focus. (Speaking of focus, I swear I'll finish my posts about heroines. This just wasn't the day for it.) Anyway, here's what came out:

It's warm, practically unbearably so for me in my sweatshirt, up on the streets. I came down to the riverside for the soothing breeze that occasionally picks up to a chill wind. It feels delicious on my sun-warmed arms. I brought books and a blanket I'd been knitting, some small projects I'd been neglecting. Somehow the play of the birds distracts me from all of my intentions. The seagulls spot a female duck eating something out of the gravel on the shoreline. They amass around, sure she has some food source they can't find. She trundles along, ignoring their shrill voices, the blue on her wing shining purple in the sunlight. A raven keeps landing in odd places and letting out a single keening cry. When I look up from retrieving my camera, he is gone and I cannot find him anywhere.

Mallards swim past the rocks in front of my bench. Their green-black heads are metallic in this spring afternoon light. They bob in the waves seeming to move with them but really they're swimming in the opposite direction. The female haunting the shoreline is chased by two rambunctious little girls and takes flight, rebuking them loudly.

A cloud rolls over the sun and the wind grows steadier, gaining more of a bite. It doesn't matter. There is a specific pair of ducks on which I have fixated and will not be distracted from. She is mostly white, a pale princess with mottled beige markings. She paddles with poise, her head held high. Her partner has the same coloring she does but with a black tail and a black head. He follows her at a consistent distance, as if he guards her from the screaming gulls. His head doesn't have the shine the other mallards do. It's as if he were carved from onyx and alabaster.

I've been reading fairy tales lately, dark ones, and it's made me romanticize things. But these two are different. No others like them are swimming here. I wonder what they are, if my mom can identify them as I've been texting her, asking her to do. Part of me hopes she can't, that they truly are something else, and that the ever-young, always faithful part of me is right to believe in what can't be seen.

Meg Murry: What She Had

From A Wrinkle in Time through The Arm of the Starfish (and An Acceptable Time, but indirectly), we get to watch Madeleine L'Engle's Meg Murry (O'Keefe) grow from awkward teenager to a loving mother. Each book offers a distinct look into Meg and shows us what makes her an admirable and ultimately human woman.

We first meet Meg in Wrinkle as a teenager with low self-confidence. Her father has disappeared with no indication that he is still alive and her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, with whom she is especially close, is having troubles at school. It's clear from the start that Meg feels things more strongly than most people and has difficulty hiding her emotions, abilities that prove to be both her greatest strength and a difficult weakness. It is Meg's love for Charles and her father that lead her into danger, determined to protect both of them. It's Meg's emotional insight that allows her to pull Charles from IT's hold in Camazotz. Meg's love leads her into Charles's body to save his life in A Wind in the Door and, in spite of an almost crippling fear for the fate of the world and her unborn child, her love leads her into Charles Wallace's mind and into history in A Swiftly Tilting Planet. It's her anger that she must learn to curb. This outrage on behalf of the people she loves leads her into fist fights with older boys, defending her little brother. In Wrinkle, it is her rage that makes her susceptible to the control of IT. IT throbbed with the rhythm of anger and hate and nearly pulled her down with them.

Meg's low self-confidence often emerges when she is comparing herself to her mother. In Wrinkle, she is frustrated, believing that "it was not an advantage to have a mother who was a scientist and a beauty as well." Meg is described as plain when she is a teenager but by Starfish, she is "a tall, strikingly beautiful woman." She knows that she has an exceptionally high IQ but never feels like she can stack up to her mother. We know from Many Waters that she's gone to college and studied high level biology but when we see her later in Starfish, she is using her education and intelligence to school her seven children. Her mother confesses to Meg's daughter Poly in An Acceptable Time that Meg's choices were at least partially because her "estimation of herself has always been low" and she chose to be the best mother she could be instead of running the risk that her best efforts in science would still prove to place her only second. Mrs. Murry adds that "women have come a long way...but there will always be problems--and glories--that are unique to women."

Meg Murry O'Keefe is a woman with a mind of her own. She is courageous regardless of her fear and loving to the point of self-sacrifice. Her strength regarding her family is boundless, raising seven children in near isolation, eagerly leaping to Charles Wallace's aid. She's also painfully self-conscious and self-demeaning. She doesn't believe that her intelligence can equal that of her mother's and in order to keep from setting an insurmountable goal for her own children, she doesn't exhibit it. She holds herself back out of fear and a misguided sense of kindness. Meg is a flawed heroine, the best and most realistic kind we can hope to have. We know that we are not perfect, that we can make mistakes, misjudge ourselves, and be afraid. Heroines like Meg allow us to see that we can do all those things and still be incredible people. We can fear but be brave. We may look down on ourselves but reading about Meg makes us think twice about what we believe we lack.

We can be humans and heroes, all at the same time.

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"Love. That was what she had that IT did not have."
-A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Heroines

I always get excited when the book I'm reading features a strong female character. I'm gearing up for a week of posts about my favorite heroines but first I want to hear about yours. There's a poll up on the right side of the blog, all ready for you to vote for your favorite lady. If you don't see her on it, comment on here and let me know who she is and where I can read about her!

The Infinitely Quotable

I've had this strange habit all my life of writing down the things that people say. I have three ring binders full of quotes from movies, songs, and books. There are pages in those binders full of quotes from family vacations and parties. There are even some pages in the Mall of America FranklinCovey store planner filled with strange things customers have said. It's always just been a compulsion of mine to keep track of things that touch me, inspire me, or make me laugh. My binders are somewhere in my parents' garage but I do have a number of books here (of course) and the delightful internet at my fingertips, so here are a few of my favorite quotes:

"To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!" -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Always do right. That will gratify some of the people and astonish the rest." -Mark Twain

"The human race has one really effective weapon and that is laughter. Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." -Mark Twain

"A person with a new idea is a crank until that idea succeeds." -Mark Twain

"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." -Mark Twain

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." -Mark Twain

"A cauliflower is just a cabbage with a college education." -Mark Twain

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"I'll never be certain, of course, but I think he meant to bring me up against the realities, to guide me across the river and to take me to the edge and to stand a kind of vigil as I chose a life for myself." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"All fire burns, little baby. You'll learn." -Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

"'Good luck,' whispered the Angel Islington. There was a rushing sound like a wind soughing across a lost forest, or the beating of mighty wings." -Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

"Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?" -The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

"Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn't written on her, it wasn't important to him." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much--so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins--without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?" -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"He knew that I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them.' God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch--man created in the image of what? the animals?--the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." -Mark Twain

"After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her." -"The Diary of Adam" by Mark Twain

"Wherever she was, there was Eden." -"The Diary of Adam" by Mark Twain