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The Enchanted Clock: A Novel
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.
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.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published February 4, 2015
About the author
Julia Kristeva
181 books914 followersJulia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works. Her Columbia University Press books include Hatred and Forgiveness (2012); The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014); and, with Philippe Sollers, Marriage as a Fine Art (2016).
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 3, 2026
It is difficult to define the book and, consequently, to provide an adequate commentary on it. The book is not an easy read; it is quite demanding. The novel takes the form of a stream of consciousness presented in an experimental style with a great deal of erudition and therefore requires greater focus and attention. However, that is precisely where its charm lies.
The novel explores the concept and definition of time from the perspectives of different characters and their lives. The novel itself resembles the universe—which is also one of its recurring themes—as it pulsates both outward and inward, toward the present and the past, and between ordinary lives and lives devoted to the study of time and the stars.
As the title suggests, the clock is the central motif: the clock of Louis XV, a measuring instrument of time that is simultaneously an ordinary clock and an astronomical clock calibrated to run until the year 9999.
The symbolism of the clock is embodied primarily in the characters Nivi, who represents an ordinary clock, and Theo, who represents an astronomical clock, with their respective understandings of time and space standing in opposition to one another.
The events take place simultaneously in the present day and in the eighteenth century, allowing us to observe the moral decline of society from two different perspectives.
Considering that the novel was challenging to read, this gave me even more motivation to try to understand it (which I am sure I couldn’t fully achieve) and, for that reason, I would recommend it only to more demanding readers.
The novel explores the concept and definition of time from the perspectives of different characters and their lives. The novel itself resembles the universe—which is also one of its recurring themes—as it pulsates both outward and inward, toward the present and the past, and between ordinary lives and lives devoted to the study of time and the stars.
As the title suggests, the clock is the central motif: the clock of Louis XV, a measuring instrument of time that is simultaneously an ordinary clock and an astronomical clock calibrated to run until the year 9999.
The symbolism of the clock is embodied primarily in the characters Nivi, who represents an ordinary clock, and Theo, who represents an astronomical clock, with their respective understandings of time and space standing in opposition to one another.
The events take place simultaneously in the present day and in the eighteenth century, allowing us to observe the moral decline of society from two different perspectives.
Considering that the novel was challenging to read, this gave me even more motivation to try to understand it (which I am sure I couldn’t fully achieve) and, for that reason, I would recommend it only to more demanding readers.
January 24, 2021
I'm not sure what to write about this book, because I can't quite make out what it is. To me it is many things and I love it for it. It took me a few months to read, both out of a lack of excitement as well as getting lost in pre-revolutionary France philosophers, and lastly a need to reread the beautiful prose. Separated by a little over 270 years, our concepts of space and time and how they interact with our own bodily experiences are still as poorly as understood as ever. What has changed, is our increased mathematical accuracy. I absolutely adored this book.
September 29, 2025
Found these butterflies. Gotta read the book for them to fly.
“automaton or the monarch? That is the question! I'm the one asking it, I, Claude-Siméon Passemant, engineer of His Majesty the king of France!”
“That is how revolutions begin,
without our being able to see
them coming: when people are dispossessed of their progeny, the only time that counts for them.”
"This complex time has no chance of existing in our reality." / think I've understood, and I want to reassure him. But he outstrips me, more subtle than I.”
“Today I've found a name for this winged visitor, my courtly lover: Leibniz. The crook of his neck, the envelope of his arched wings incurve the train of the white cloud, hook it onto the light that deploys upon the shivers of the water.”
“the Great Clockmaker's
impersonation and service. We separate reason from faith and we lose the infinity of inner experience. Or what remains of it."
"Basically, the French Revolution occurs in the wake of the Voltaireans or,
more concretely, in the movement of Passemant the Newtonian's clock."
"If you continue to spin out that metaphor, you will notice that the social contract,
supposed to bring happiness on earth, was programmed from the start to become a universal timepiece— globalized, in the end, but perpetually needing repair."
"In search of unlocatable
values that do not dissociate but definitively depend on the value of values: the Supreme Being.
"
"Newton's God, consisting of physics. In politics, the Supreme Being of evil spreads terror, becomes totalitarian ...Among us postmoderns, we prefer to put him between parentheses, more or less evacuated.
"
"We are rescuers: we repair the endemic crisis of the incurable financial system, we
announce the systematic flattening of our social systems”
“A smidgeon of general culture all the same, buried under the technological excellence of MIT.”
“All kinds of stories can be learned in the naphthalene of the NationalArchives, little weight in the face of what Astro retains from the documents gathered by his two Zebulons, Tom and Jeffrey. “
“Yes, "the king is naked." The French are in advance of others when they succeed in making a spectacle of this truth. And he, the hunter of gravitational waves, had to go underground to figure that out!
Does a man grow in majesty when he unveils the hidden mechanisms of his pleasures and his authority, in the image of those rotational watches that Claude-Siméon constructed for his sovereign? Not sure. It's not because he entrusts his pleasures and his decisions to the favorites that power doesn't abuse the feminine sex. Theo is in agreement with this.
Except that by displaying the political power of eroticism like that, the man at the summit of the state is not only revealing the wellspring of power; he lets it be understood that women can have their part in it. Also. In some situations.
On the condition of preparing their pleasures and their knowledge in it.
Along the way, Astro is surprised to realize that the politico-erotic avatars
of the royal French clock are only marking the start of the beginning of the end of the occidental male. And of Power with a capital P, the one the Terror is going to decapitate.
But that survives as necessary though unsustainable illusion in all regimes, be they democratic. Even women are seeking it: many are those who submit to it; others exert it like men. Is it really worth guillotining to understand that the recomposition of authority is not done with strokes of the ax and the pick? It is already under way in this war-and-peace of the sexes openly performed in the Le Nôtre gardens and between the Mansart walls. War-and-peace that continues thanks to
revolutions, then feminism,
ART, surrogacy, stem cells, artificial uteruses, and other such clonings. Even Astro finds himself at a loss: biology is moving as fast as cosmology, if not faster.
The ancien régime is far behind us; marriage is available for all; certain men and women prefer to veil their faces, while others want to be everything and have everything ... Here are the new Egerias of the globalized transhumance: they run in the Marais in the summer, they advance, they are in a hurry, they jostle one another. A swarm of laughing gulls: saleswomen, shoppers, hairdressers, researchers; they fly toward 9999 and beyond, they have won ...This doesn't mean the
occidental male has lost: Astro is far from envisaging such a thing”
“No human form today can contain the present knowledge about time and space, no more than embody it. Writers, scientists, artists, and musicians are no more capable of embodying it than world leaders. However, since a 3D photo contains knowledge of another temporality, the idea of integrating it into human life is tempting.
It arouses the imaginary, the passions. The social animal being by nature successive, it does not wish to know in what expansion it is living. It says to itself that life is already complicated enough without that; it does not imagine that other vital experiences could be possible-precisely in expansion. Not in a box, nor beehive. observe my documents, read them on the screen of my computer: without a doubt the beehive works and makes me live. Through me and without me. I escape from myself, and a sort of swarm rebuilds, rebuilds me.”
“I celebrate the feminine genius of Judith triumphant, transported by an ecstatic tornado like my baroque Teresa. I have no need to hide that it was Theo who opened this world for me after having fished me out of the waters of the Fier d'Ars. Why won't he admit that he is following in my footsteps in the kingdom of Claude-Siméon?”
“I look for Leibniz the swan out front, beyond my computer screen…A flotilla of six black Leibnizes accompany him. A sign the wind is changing. Nature is healthy around here. Let's keep an eye on events, then."
“Ugo the toxic and Stan who speaks in haikus. I? Who? Dust of stars. Programmed by neurons that I reprogram in reverse by means of words, of vagabond meanings, of abolished and reemergent time.
Me and my neurons. Fourteen billion. And their thousand billion nerve connections.
Thousands of billions of cells of two hundred different types, 10 percent immortal, the others constantly renewed.
We observe ourselves. We test ourselves. Who knows whom?
The molecules have the first word; should they let go of me, the trip is over. But it suffices for my hormones to hold on and for me to take my beehive off its hinges.“
“I generally answer within seconds, me too. But the unpredictable can happen. And it does.”
“I am in my Atlantic refuge.
The storm has blown all the barrels of salt from the salt marshes against the windows of my veranda.”
“It's not because he fished me out with his boat that I take Astro for the Savior.”
“Stan and my A. We are islanded, Theo and I, the way others are landed”
“specialist in chaotic inflation, a yin/yang connoisseur of binary thought and a practitioner of the transcendental respiration of yoga.”
“So that's what time is: rhythmic metamorphoses, luminous, volatile enclosure.”
“A flowerbed of blooming forest decorated the wall of the property; I would hide in its vegetal light. The dew moistened my hair, the dirt crunched under my sandals”
“I didn't say anything. At the time the idea did not occur to me that this devastation could be part of a war long smoldering and declared by cowards against my secretive person.
"They'll grow back next year, don't worry!" snickered the little pests.
I didn't believe them.”
“automaton or the monarch? That is the question! I'm the one asking it, I, Claude-Siméon Passemant, engineer of His Majesty the king of France!”
“That is how revolutions begin,
without our being able to see
them coming: when people are dispossessed of their progeny, the only time that counts for them.”
"This complex time has no chance of existing in our reality." / think I've understood, and I want to reassure him. But he outstrips me, more subtle than I.”
“Today I've found a name for this winged visitor, my courtly lover: Leibniz. The crook of his neck, the envelope of his arched wings incurve the train of the white cloud, hook it onto the light that deploys upon the shivers of the water.”
“the Great Clockmaker's
impersonation and service. We separate reason from faith and we lose the infinity of inner experience. Or what remains of it."
"Basically, the French Revolution occurs in the wake of the Voltaireans or,
more concretely, in the movement of Passemant the Newtonian's clock."
"If you continue to spin out that metaphor, you will notice that the social contract,
supposed to bring happiness on earth, was programmed from the start to become a universal timepiece— globalized, in the end, but perpetually needing repair."
"In search of unlocatable
values that do not dissociate but definitively depend on the value of values: the Supreme Being.
"
"Newton's God, consisting of physics. In politics, the Supreme Being of evil spreads terror, becomes totalitarian ...Among us postmoderns, we prefer to put him between parentheses, more or less evacuated.
"
"We are rescuers: we repair the endemic crisis of the incurable financial system, we
announce the systematic flattening of our social systems”
“A smidgeon of general culture all the same, buried under the technological excellence of MIT.”
“All kinds of stories can be learned in the naphthalene of the NationalArchives, little weight in the face of what Astro retains from the documents gathered by his two Zebulons, Tom and Jeffrey. “
“Yes, "the king is naked." The French are in advance of others when they succeed in making a spectacle of this truth. And he, the hunter of gravitational waves, had to go underground to figure that out!
Does a man grow in majesty when he unveils the hidden mechanisms of his pleasures and his authority, in the image of those rotational watches that Claude-Siméon constructed for his sovereign? Not sure. It's not because he entrusts his pleasures and his decisions to the favorites that power doesn't abuse the feminine sex. Theo is in agreement with this.
Except that by displaying the political power of eroticism like that, the man at the summit of the state is not only revealing the wellspring of power; he lets it be understood that women can have their part in it. Also. In some situations.
On the condition of preparing their pleasures and their knowledge in it.
Along the way, Astro is surprised to realize that the politico-erotic avatars
of the royal French clock are only marking the start of the beginning of the end of the occidental male. And of Power with a capital P, the one the Terror is going to decapitate.
But that survives as necessary though unsustainable illusion in all regimes, be they democratic. Even women are seeking it: many are those who submit to it; others exert it like men. Is it really worth guillotining to understand that the recomposition of authority is not done with strokes of the ax and the pick? It is already under way in this war-and-peace of the sexes openly performed in the Le Nôtre gardens and between the Mansart walls. War-and-peace that continues thanks to
revolutions, then feminism,
ART, surrogacy, stem cells, artificial uteruses, and other such clonings. Even Astro finds himself at a loss: biology is moving as fast as cosmology, if not faster.
The ancien régime is far behind us; marriage is available for all; certain men and women prefer to veil their faces, while others want to be everything and have everything ... Here are the new Egerias of the globalized transhumance: they run in the Marais in the summer, they advance, they are in a hurry, they jostle one another. A swarm of laughing gulls: saleswomen, shoppers, hairdressers, researchers; they fly toward 9999 and beyond, they have won ...This doesn't mean the
occidental male has lost: Astro is far from envisaging such a thing”
“No human form today can contain the present knowledge about time and space, no more than embody it. Writers, scientists, artists, and musicians are no more capable of embodying it than world leaders. However, since a 3D photo contains knowledge of another temporality, the idea of integrating it into human life is tempting.
It arouses the imaginary, the passions. The social animal being by nature successive, it does not wish to know in what expansion it is living. It says to itself that life is already complicated enough without that; it does not imagine that other vital experiences could be possible-precisely in expansion. Not in a box, nor beehive. observe my documents, read them on the screen of my computer: without a doubt the beehive works and makes me live. Through me and without me. I escape from myself, and a sort of swarm rebuilds, rebuilds me.”
“I celebrate the feminine genius of Judith triumphant, transported by an ecstatic tornado like my baroque Teresa. I have no need to hide that it was Theo who opened this world for me after having fished me out of the waters of the Fier d'Ars. Why won't he admit that he is following in my footsteps in the kingdom of Claude-Siméon?”
“I look for Leibniz the swan out front, beyond my computer screen…A flotilla of six black Leibnizes accompany him. A sign the wind is changing. Nature is healthy around here. Let's keep an eye on events, then."
“Ugo the toxic and Stan who speaks in haikus. I? Who? Dust of stars. Programmed by neurons that I reprogram in reverse by means of words, of vagabond meanings, of abolished and reemergent time.
Me and my neurons. Fourteen billion. And their thousand billion nerve connections.
Thousands of billions of cells of two hundred different types, 10 percent immortal, the others constantly renewed.
We observe ourselves. We test ourselves. Who knows whom?
The molecules have the first word; should they let go of me, the trip is over. But it suffices for my hormones to hold on and for me to take my beehive off its hinges.“
“I generally answer within seconds, me too. But the unpredictable can happen. And it does.”
“I am in my Atlantic refuge.
The storm has blown all the barrels of salt from the salt marshes against the windows of my veranda.”
“It's not because he fished me out with his boat that I take Astro for the Savior.”
“Stan and my A. We are islanded, Theo and I, the way others are landed”
“specialist in chaotic inflation, a yin/yang connoisseur of binary thought and a practitioner of the transcendental respiration of yoga.”
“So that's what time is: rhythmic metamorphoses, luminous, volatile enclosure.”
“A flowerbed of blooming forest decorated the wall of the property; I would hide in its vegetal light. The dew moistened my hair, the dirt crunched under my sandals”
“I didn't say anything. At the time the idea did not occur to me that this devastation could be part of a war long smoldering and declared by cowards against my secretive person.
"They'll grow back next year, don't worry!" snickered the little pests.
I didn't believe them.”
June 3, 2019
Between the cover and the blurb about this, I was so excited to read this book. I hate panning books, but I just found this to be overly verbose and almost purposefully pompous. I was actually intrigued by the story and adore French history, but it was so muddled by the random musings of the main character, who was extremely full of herself and totally elitist. It was a real struggle to finish. I found the phrasing purposefully obtuse as well. If the writing wasn’t so pretentious, this would have been much better.
September 22, 2018
This book really didn’t do it for me. Too abstract, too wandering. I found that I just really didn’t care at all about the characters, and no book will be good for me if I don’t care about the outcome.
August 25, 2018
I'm a fan of Kristeva's work on literary theory - hell, I referred to her theories of intertextuality in my master's thesis. But even though there are many passages of beauty in this novel - her own "jouissance" - surpassing pleasure - it's a tough read.
September 23, 2018
Couldn't keep interested enough to finish. I liked the historical parts but the modern protagonist's overanalyzing of everything was tedious and felt like a chore to read, so I set this one aside about a third in with no desire to pick it back up again.
January 23, 2025
This was bad and what made it even worse was the fact that the storyline of this book had so much potential. I didn't like any of the characters and the stream of consciousness style narration was incredibly irritating. Reading this was a waste of my time.
April 30, 2026
It's way too hard to follow! I've really tried for 6 chapters. I got lost continually, and some of the language felt contrived and made me feel stupid! There are too many books out there to waste time on this. What a disappointment, as the preview looked interesting!
August 19, 2022
This was one book I could not read, the sentences lost me, I think this might just be a huge failure of translation (english version). A shame, the book looked interesting from its description.
April 13, 2018
had to stop partway through because it was so dense and utterly FRENCH. so relieved that I bought this in translation and not in the original because I doubt my brain could handle the prosody in French. the translation is very good in that it captures the French literary-ness of it, but it turns out I'm not actually that into French literature. it's very abstract and visceral and beautiful but the abstraction loses me - same reason I could never get through a la recherche du temps perdu probably and quit french lit after one semester in college. bought this mostly because I am a Kristeva fangirl from the theory side of things, I might stick to that in future because I honestly cannot quite make sense of this one.
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August 20, 2018I love the premise, and I really *wanted* to like the book. The writing style is extremely difficult to follow - I don't like to work that hard when I read for pleasure. It might be the translation - it might just be a French style of writing, but it was disappointing.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews