As she's also left them millions – Elspeth is a rare-book dealer, obviously a far more lucrative profession than I realised – and one of the twins, Julia, doesn't much feel like going to university or getting a job or doing anything except boss her twin Valentina around, this is convenient.Īunt Elspeth, of course, is the ghost in the flat, and Niffenegger works extremely hard for almost 400 pages to construct a story out of this assemblage of inklings, trying to make it about identity (in addition to "the delights and inconveniences of mental illness and immortality", as the reader's note tells us). She leaves her flat to her twin sister's two American daughters, whom she's never met, on the entirely credible condition that they come to live in it for a year.
The aunt, Elspeth Noblin, is herself a twin, and she's dying prematurely of cancer. In order to join his story with the twins whose aunt dies, Niffenegger expediently places the aunt in the flat below Martin's in Highgate, overlooking the cemetery. Martin, the man who can't leave his apartment, has such severe obsessive-compulsive disorder that he drives his beloved wife away. Instead of abandoning these notions, Niffenegger thriftily stitched them all together, and the result is the patchwork it sounds. Then it was about twin girls whose aunt dies One day a ghost appeared in the book," and so forth. First "it was about a man who can't leave his apartment, and a girl who visits him. In a note to the reader, Niffenegger candidly, if perhaps unwisely, admits before the novel begins that her story was full of false starts.
Attempting to tell a haunting ghost story about immortality and history with metaphysical overtones, all she manages is theosophy. In her long-awaited second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, Niffenegger angles in time's stream once again, fishing for meaning. Widely hailed as wonderfully original, this device essentially reworked Kurt Vonnegut's conceit in Slaughterhouse-Five of becoming "unstuck in time". Her enormously popular first novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, was the story of a man who involuntarily time-travels through his own life. L ike Henry David Thoreau, Audrey Niffenegger seems to view time as but the stream in which her characters go a'fishing.
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