i finished.

i careened through this book from beginning to end. crying constantly for no reason. spending four days in an inexplicable foul mood until i closed the book and realized, hey!, that niffenegger lady was making me feel bad.

i can’t really put my finger on it. her writing is brilliant. stunning. so detailed, in fact, that this might be the problem with it. i had nightmares for days that i was a man with legs cut off at the knees. i would drag myself through the snow looking for my feet.

it was too much. the scene with clare curled on the bed holding a fetus in a pool of blood was too much. too much, too much. my brain could not handle the various and multitudinous ways that niffenegger devised to give her characters pain. and the last tiny scene was not enough redemption for me. i don’t know why clare and henry loved each other (if you take sex out of the equation). i don’t know why henry was shot by clare’s father. and i don’t know why alba wasn’t the saving grace. where did she disappear to at the end of the novel?

i think, perhaps, that i wouldn’t have been so completely traumatized if i had other things to do with my time. if, perhaps, i didn’t live my life through characters in novels and absorb whatever i’m reading so completely that i forget where i end and fiction begins. but, even so, it was too much. i am still choking on niffenegger’s violent and disturbing images. i’m counting on the true confessions of charlotte doyle to save me.