Description
Book SynopsisJulia Kristeva's intricate, multifaceted novel The Enchanted Clock is built around a golden astronomical clock in the Palace of Versailles. Part detective mystery, part historical fiction, and full of ruminations on memory, love, and the transcendence of linear time, it is one of the most illuminating works of one of France's great thinkers.
Trade ReviewJulia Kristeva’s
L’horloge enchantée 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 Bové, 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... *
Table of ContentsI. Versailles1. When?
2. “THEO.” What a Story!
3. My Name is Claude-Siméon 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 Collège 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 Matter17. Inside–Outside
18. What Is an Internal Coup d’État?
19. I Have Again Dreamed of Your Ancestor
20. Passemant with the Cassinis
21. Here I Am at the Place de l’Étoile
22. Happiness and Fire: With Émilie du Châtelet
23. Do New Patients Exist?
24. In Praise of Illusions
25. Marianne’s Silhouette
26. The Dream of the Primordial Universe
III. Rebirth27. 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 Clock37. 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
