In the Palace of Versailles there is a fabulous golden clock, made for Louis XV by the king’s engineer, Claude-Siméon Passemant. The astronomical clock shows the phases of the moon and the movements of the planets, and it will tell time - hours, minutes, seconds, and even sixtieths of seconds - until the year 9999. Passemant’s clock brings the nature of time into sharp focus in Julia Kristeva’s intricate, poetic novel The Enchanted Clock.
Nivi Delisle, a psychoanalyst and magazine editor, nearly drowns while swimming off the Île de Ré; the astrophysicist Theo Passemant fishes her out of the water. They become lovers. While Theo wonders if he is descended from the clockmaker Passemant, Nivi’s son Stan, who suffers from occasional comas, develops a passion for the remarkable clock at Versailles. Soon Nivi is fixated on its maker. But then the clock is stolen, and when a young writer for Nivi’s magazine mysteriously dies, the clock is found near his body.
The Enchanted Clock combines past and present, jumping back and forth between points of view and across eras from eighteenth-century Versailles to the present day. Its stylistically inventive narrative voices bring both immediacy and depth to our understanding of consciousness. Nivi’s life resembles her creator’s in many respects, coloring Kristeva’s customary erudition with autobiographical poignancy.
Part detective mystery, part historical fiction, The Enchanted Clock is a philosophically and linguistically multifaceted novel, full of poetic ruminations on memory, love, and the transcendence of linear time. It is one of the most illuminating works of one of France’s great writers and thinkers.
By:
Julia Kristeva
Translated by:
Armine Kotin Mortimer
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780231180467
ISBN 10: 0231180462
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 02 January 2018
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
I. Versailles 1. When? 2. THEO. What a Story! 3. My Name is Claude-Simeon Passemant 4. Nivi Can See Him as If She Were There . . . 5. Even Though Time Disappears 6. I Dream, Therefore I Am 7. At the College Mazarin, During the Regency 8. Now 9. Where Are You, Astro of Mine? 10. King, God, and Complex Time 11. Louis the Beloved 12. The Famous Clock 13. Among the Convulsionaries 14. Someone Has Whispered a Sentence in My Sleep 15. You Are My Depth 16. Mama, Are You French? II. Black Matter 17. Inside-Outside 18. What Is an Internal Coup d'Etat? 19. I Have Again Dreamed of Your Ancestor 20. Passemant with the Cassinis 21. Here I Am at the Place de l'Etoile 22. Happiness and Fire: With Emilie du Chatelet 23. Do New Patients Exist? 24. In Praise of Illusions 25. Marianne's Silhouette 26. The Dream of the Primordial Universe III. Rebirth 27. Death Is Not News 28. Overdose 29. Once Again I Have Broken with the Human Race 30. A Ray of Icy Light 31. Revolutions Start Like This 32. Hyperconnectivity 33. Common Intensities, Strange Intimacies 34. Scenes from Life at Court 35. Theo Has Just Landed 36. Variations on Suicide IV. The Theft of the Clock 37. 9999 Has Been Stolen 38. Beauty Spots 39. Superluminal Speed 40. Inestimable Trophy 41. Signed, Passemant 42. The King Is Naked; or, The Beginning of an End 43. What If He's the One! 44. Aubane Would Have Preferred to Evaporate 45. Jealousy? What Jealousy? 46. Conspiracy for a Cause 47. Together Again: The King and His Clockmaker 48. Beehive 49. Where Were You? 50. What the Press Wasn't Saying 51. Paradise Is at the Lux 52. Silence and Poem 53. Rose Laurels
Julia Kristeva is professor of linguistics at the Universite de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works and novels. Her Columbia University Press books include Murder in Byzantium: A Novel (2005); Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila (2014); and, with Philippe Sollers, Marriage as a Fine Art (2016). Armine Kotin Mortimer is professor emerita of French literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her contributions to French culture were recognized with the Palmes Academiques distinction in 2009. She is the translator of two books by Philippe Sollers.
Reviews for The Enchanted Clock: A Novel
A veritable tour de force that infuses the novelistic genre with theatrical and essayistic undertones. -- Verena Conley, Harvard University An original, creative narrative on the topic of time, cognizant of a complex intellectual world while also telling a beautiful and compelling story. -- Carol Bove, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Pittsburgh and Professor Emerita of French, Westminster College
