The Enchanted Clock
A Novel
-
- $28.99
-
- $28.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kristeva's marvelously strange novel about a woman captivated by an 18th-century artifact reads like a philosophical treatise wrapped in a love story with a little mystery mixed in. Nivi Delisle is a Parisian psychoanalyst and magazine editor fascinated by Claude-Sim on Passemant, engineer to King Louis XV and creator of a large four-faced clock that sits in the palace at Versailles and is designed to keep time until the year 9999. Nivi's son suffers from a mysterious illness, and her lover Theo, an astrophysicist, travels the globe to observe the universe from different vantage points. As she walks the streets of Paris, Nivi often conjures an imagined Passemant while she meditates on the nature and passage of time. Though the plot eventually expands to include a mystery surrounding Theo's ancestry, the suspicious death of one of Nivi's coworkers, and the theft of Passemant's clock from its home in Versailles, Nivi's philosophical ruminations on the nature of time, space, and the conditions of human life reject a strictly linear reading of events, forcing the reader to wonder what exactly is happening, and when. Mortimer's translation captures Kriteva's sinuous representation of Nivi's imagination.
