In the Palace of Versailles there is a fabulous golden clock, made
for Louis XV by the king's engineer, Claude-Simeon 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 Ile de Re; 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.
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