| The Enchanted Clock Contributor(s): Kristeva, Julia (Author), Mortimer, Armine Kotin (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0231180470 ISBN-13: 9780231180474 Publisher: Columbia University Press OUR PRICE: $19.80 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: October 2019 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Cultural Heritage - Fiction | Psychological - Fiction | Historical - General |
| Dewey: 843.914 |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 5.1" W x 8.1" (0.80 lbs) 336 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In the Palace of Versailles there is a fabulous golden clock, made for Louis XV by the king's engineer, Claude-Sim on 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 le de R ; 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Mortimer, Armine Kotin: - Armine Kotin Mortimer is Professor Emerita and Research Professor in the Department of French and Italian at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of For Love or for Money: Balzac's Rhetorical Realism (The Ohio State University Press, 2011) and has translated a number of books from French, including Philippe Sollers, Casanova the Irresistible, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016) and our own translation of Kristeva's The Enchanted Clock (Columbia University Press, 2017)Kristeva, Julia: - Julia Kristeva is professor of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works and novels, including The Severed Head: Capital Visions, This Incredible Need to Believe, Hatred and Forgiveness, and Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, all published by Columbia. She is the recipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought and the Holberg International Memorial Prize. |