Review: The Time Keeper

The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I really enjoyed The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom. He is an author that I will not only move up on my to-be-read pile when one of his new books comes out, I will stop reading whatever I'm currently reading to start his!

And once again Mr. Albom does not disappoint his fans. The Time Keeper is a philosophical/theological themed novel about temporality. Speaking as a Heideggerian (Being and Time, Time and Being) and as someone who has not worn a watch in many, many, many years, I usually dismiss most authors' awkward and feeble attempts to grapple with this subject. But I was curious to find out Mitch Albom's spin on it.

In The Time Keeper, we are presented with three simultaneous and eventually intertwining stories about temporality: a teen girl decides she has too much of it and wants to end her life as soon as possible; a rich man (the fourteenth richest in the world, we are told) doesn't have enough time left because he is dying; and Dor - who first lived around the time of the building of the great tower of Babel - the first man to measure time.

Each of these characters has much to learn about themselves and about their relationship to time. For those of you too busy to read this short novel, the moral that Mr. Albom imparts is that we have all the time we need to lead our lives, God neither apportions too much of it nor too little.

I couldn't have put it any better. And neither could Heidegger.

If you've enjoyed Mitch Albom's previous works, you'll definitely enjoy this one, too. If you've never read Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper is as good an introduction to this great author as any of his other books.



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