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