β Scribed by Julia Kristeva
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In the Palace of Versailles there is a fabulous golden clock, made for Louis XV by the king's engineer, Claude-SimοΏ½on 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 novelThe Enchanted Clock.
Nivi Delisle, a psychoanalyst and magazine editor, nearly drowns while swimming off the οΏ½le de RοΏ½; 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 Clockcombines 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 Clockis 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.
France
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
A wondrous and redemptive debut novel, set in a stark world where evil and magic coincide, The Enchanted combines the empathy and lyricism of Alice Sebold with the dark, imaginative power of Stephen King. "This is an enchanted place. Others don't see it, but I do." The enchanted place is an ancient
Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper i
Sylvia Winters just found a job and an apartment in her hometown of Dreyerville, Michigan, but she is hesitant to return. Eight years ago, she jilted her fiancΓ©, Joe Dixon, telling him that she was moving to Chicago because small-town living was not for her. But she was lying. Syl was headed to Chic
**Named one of Pop Sugar's Best Books to Put in your Beachbag this summer.** **A Booktrib "Romance to get you in the swing for Wedding Season" of 2019** **A Book Riot "Five New Diverse Romantic Comedies"** **Bustle's "21 new summer novels to spice up your summer reading"** To Leila Abid's tradit