Audrey Niffenegger: Her Fearful Symmetry

'Her Fearful Symmetry'

Last week I read Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry. Having read and loved The Time Traveler's Wife, when I came across another of her books I was interested to see how it compared. I liked the premise - Twins inheriting a flat from an English Aunt they never knew existed who, though dead and buried, continues to haunt her old home. I'm a sucker for family secrets and ghost stories, so it ticked a lot of boxes for me.

And I really devoured this book. I read it in 2 days.


I really enjoy Niffenegger's style of writing. She's a brilliant story teller and knows how to keep a reader in suspense, which ultimately made me want to keep reading, but having now finished the book, I don't necessarily think that it was the most well crafted story.

Unfortunately the reveal of the big, terrible family secret didn't pack much of a punch as all the characters had known about it all along, just feigning ignorance for the sake of everyone else. I'd also seen it coming pages and pages ago.

But, I think the main issue for me is that, whilst Niffenegger is brilliant at giving psychological insight into the minds of her characters, I'm not sure I really liked the Twins, arguably the centre of the story, which makes it very hard to empathise.

Valentina and Julia are clingy and childish in their twin-ness and really grated on me, which was probably mostly down to personal taste. They're pale, skinny and delicate, insist upon dressing the same at 21 and both still virgins for fear of ever doing something without the other. When Valentina does eventually start trying to spread her wings, something Julia immediately and consistently denies, her solution seems drastic and ridiculous (see spoiler below).

Elspeth, the dead Aunt, and Robert, her lover, are better fleshed out and feel much more real though. Elspeth's sequences as a Ghost trying to find her feet (literally; it takes her a while to re-assume a human form) are particularly enjoyable, and you can feel her boredom as she's trapped in the flat without being able to interact with the living around her.

Robert's grief is palpable and believable, though his budding relationship with Valentina, his dead lover's eerily similar niece, is fairly uncomfortable.

Having said that though, there really was something about the ghostly side of the plot. The ending stuck with me even days later, (Valentina asks Elspeth for her help by temporarily removing her soul from her body, the idea being that Valentina can return to it after her funeral and live life away from Julia, who will think her twin is dead. Elspeth goes along with the ploy but uses it for her own reasons: to steal Valentina's body to be with Robert. Ultimately, everyone ends up miserable - Valentina is stuck in ghost-limbo, Julia and her parents think Valentina is dead and Robert, having assisted in Valentina's deception, is horrified at having unwittingly helped 'kill' a girl so his lover can return to him. In a rare show of backbone, he ends up leaving Elspeth out of disgust, albeit after getting her/Valentina pregnant) and I still haven't quite shaken it off. It was suitably ghoulish and shocking, and gives a lot of food for thought as you think about the layers of the story and what they mean.

I also really enjoyed the side story about the reclusive cross-word setter who lives in the flat upstairs and his overcoming his crippling OCD to win back his wife. Niffenegger's portrayal of the disorder is realistic and sympathetic, and his wife's decision to leave him at the beginning of the book, despite her sincere love for him, is understandable. They continue to love one another from a distance, and the scene where they share a meal on Marijke's birthday - she in a restaurant in Amsterdam, and Martin at home with a microwave dinner - via mobile phones is particularly touching.

I can see why this book didn't receive the critical acclaim The Time Traveler's Wife did - it simply isn't as good - but it is definitely worth a read: It's a good little book about what happens when love dies and being careful about what you wish for. Perhaps I'm only less enthusiastic because I know what Niffenegger can achieve in terms of a well-crafted story.

6/10.