Reviews for Somewhere in Time

The average rating for Somewhere in Time based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-14 00:00:00 George Reid A beautiful romance from the pen of a writer more famous for his horror thrillers. How far are you willing to go for the woman you love? Richard Collier has never met the woman of his dreams. And now, at thirty-six, it might be to late, as he is diagnosed with an unoperable brain tumor. As a screenwriter he should know better than most how dreams are created out of thin air, yet in his vulnerable state of mind he is not immune to flights of fancy. While staying overnight at a luxury hotel near San Diego, he finds himself falling under the spell of an old photograph found in a dusty basement: he decides this is the woman he has been waiting for all his life. The only problem: the photograph is 80 years old, dating back to 1896, and the actress in the image has probably beed dead a long time ago. No, it's more than beauty. It's the expression on her face that haunts and conquers me. That gentle, honest, sweet expression. I wish I could have met her. The image of the beautiful actress from last century becomes such an obsession for Richard, that he is constantly thinking about her, asleep or awake, as in a trance. He reads every available book about her life, about the period when she stayed in the same Coronado hotel near San Diego, about the history of the hotel and about the roles in the hteathre that made her famous. Richard discovers that Elise McKenna was as famous in her time as Ingrid Bergman or Audrey Hepburn would be decades later. And, like a true diva, she kept her private life a mystery, carefully protecting her intimacy from the prying eyes of the press. Almost half of the novel explores the total immersion of Richard into the life of Elise McKenna. He surrounds himself with her photographs, with her theatrical reviews, with the meagre tidbits available about her personal life. It appears a major change of heart in her career occured in the very same hotel, during a late autumn performance of a piece by J M Barrie. Richard somehow convinces himself that in order to discover her secret it is enough to desire it with all his being, mind and body. If only he could convince himself it is possible to travel back in time, he would meet and talk to his idol in the flesh. That is all he wants from life right now. So he engages in an intensive regimen of hypnotic self-instruction, telling himself over and over and over again: It's Thursday afternoon. You're lying on the bed in your room at the Hotel del Coronado and it's Thursday afternoon, November 19, 1896. Your mind accepts this absolutely. There is no question in your mind. It is November 19, 1896, Thursday November 19, 1896. You're Richard Collier. Thirty-six. Lying on your hotel bed, eyes closed, on Thursday afternoon, November 19, 1896. 1896, 1896, Room 527. Hotel del Coronado. Thursday afternoon, November 19, 1896. Many writers have tried their hand at time-travel stories, inventing sophisticated machines or alternate dimension in the time-space continuum. Why not accept for once that love is strong enough to take you to the place your heart desires? The whole world might only be an illusion and we only live inside our heads anyway. So give Richard the benefit of the doubt, and let him wake up from his hypnosis in 1896, in a room of the Hotel del Coronado. I'm pulled in two directions simultaneously - toward yearning and toward reason. It's at times like these I hate the brain. It always builds more barriers than it can topple. In the second part of the novel, Richard gets to meet Elise, and because this is a romantic story, she seems to have been waiting just for him, all her life. The concept sounds so corny and cheap when I put it down on paper, like a typical obsessed weirdo stalking an innocent woman, but from the pen of Matheson, it is a thing of beauty, charged with passion and melancholy. With an elegant economy of means, he captures the beauty of the Belle Epoque building ( "Last of the extravagantly conceived seaside hotels" ), the different social conventions and atitudes of the turn of the century, and most of all the difficulties even beautiful and succesful women had to face in a male dominated society. Elise is very much alone, self-reliant but wary of men's attentions, bullied by her impressario and discredited in the eyes of the public simply by being an actress. when she finally starts to express her inner feelings, we discover that people in 1896 were as passioante and in need of affection as today or 500 years ago. In only a couple of letters, Elise captured my imagination just as easily as her picture enchanted Richard Collier: "And life, most sweet, as heart to heart, speaks kindly when we meet and part." The story stops much too soon for me, a bittersweet moment that is probably meant to encourage us to be true to our feelings and to live fully in the present, because it passes in the blink of an eye. What we learn from 1896 is that people seemed more alive then because they cared more about the world around them, and the greatest crime that Richard noticed in his 1970's contemporaries is an apathy and a waste of such precious moments: There is something compelling about human beings believing deeply. I do not intend to discuss, at length, that time I left. I will only say say that there is memory of indifferent atitudes toward many things, among them life itself. When asked in an interview about his favorite creation, Matheson nominated Bid Time Return , rechristened Somewhere in Time for the big screen translation that he also scripted (""Somewhere in Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death.... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.") . He probably put more of himself into the story than in his more commercial thrillers, including a love of music illustrated by references to Lehar, Strauss, and especially Mahler ( 'Has there ever been a more heartbreaking farewell to life expressed in music?'. Even more fascinating is the story of the novel's inception: Elise McKenna is based on a real character from 1896. [source: wikipedia] Maude Adams was a beautiful actress whose picture Matheson saw in a hotel lobby. Matheson began to read about her career, and his imagination soon transformed this encounter into a novel. I enjoyed reading more on the internet about Miss Adams and about the real Hotel del Coronado, a place that attracted celebrities like flies, and was familair to me from Billy Wilder's "Some Like it Hot" movie. The line between fiction and real life becomes in this way slightly blurred and more convincing, for all the impossiblity of time travel that my brain insists on raising up. I would like now to watch again the movie with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, as the only way to spend a little more time with this magical romance.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-22 00:00:00 Misty Loveless A screenwriter with an inoperable brain tumor becomes obsessed with an actress from the turn of the century and uses hypnosis to travel back in time to meet her. I've been reading a fair bit of Richard Matheson lately and stumbled upon this at the used bookstore. After leaving my kindle at work over a long weekend, I pulled the trigger on it. Firstly, the first 33% of this book was an uphill climb. Wearing snow shoes. With a safe strapped to my back. Richard Collier finds out he has a brain tumor and decides to go for one last road trip. He stays at a hotel, becomes infatuated with an actress from 1896, and travels back to the 1890's with self hypnosis. It takes over 100 pages for him to get there. Also, time travel via self hypnosis? I had good intentions but life's too short to push through something I'm barely interested in, even if the author is responsible for most of the great Twilight Zone episodes. I may return to it at some future date.