Description
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.
About the Author
Julia Kristeva is professor emerita 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
Julia Kristeva's L'horloge enchantee is a veritable tour de force, a brilliant piece of writing that infuses the novelistic genre with theatrical and essayistic undertones. Kristeva deftly weaves together multiple strands of a narrative that links a presently degraded state of France, Europe, and the world, in the grip of violence, fanaticism, rigid identity politics, anti-intellectualism, a general loss of quality of life, to the eve of revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. -- 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
This translation of Julia Kristeva's The Enchanted Clock is expertly done. It is an easy and pleasant read that captures the content, tone, and rhythm of the original. A fascinating novel by one of France's most important intellectuals rendered into English by one of our best translators. -- Brian Reilly, Fordham University
Kristeva's marvelously strange novel about a woman captivated by an eighteenth-century artifact reads like a philosophical treatise wrapped in a love story with a little mystery mixed in. * Publishers Weekly *
The Enchanted Clock is an elaborate . . . meditation on time. * Times Literary Supplement *
Highly recommended. -- Anna Maria Polidori * Articles and more... *
Book Information
ISBN 9780231180474
Author Julia Kristeva
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press