The Enchanted Clock

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.

Jamie's adventure begins with his summer holiday at Aunt Jane's Flamingo Pink cottage and the 'Twist of a Key' in an old wooden Grandfather's Clock. He can't believe he is faced with the 'Challenge of Chime' or the doom that will come if he does not complete all the challenges ahead of him successfully. Jamie delights in meeting his new friends especially the Time-Keeper who explains how he is the 'Chosen Guest' in their Enchanted Land. The evil Time-Taker has quite a different plan and is determined to see Jamie fail his mission. He plots to take the Crown of Cogs from the Time-Keeper and will not tolerate any child getting in his way.

Jamie's adventure begins with his summer holiday at Aunt Jane's Flamingo Pink cottage and the 'Twist of a Key' in an old wooden Grandfather's Clock. He can't believe he is faced with the 'Challenge of Chime' or the doom that will come if he does not complete all the challenges ahead of him successfully. Jamie delights in meeting his new friends especially the Time-Keeper who explains how he is the 'Chosen Guest' in their Enchanted Land. The evil Time-Taker has quite a different plan and is determined to see Jamie fail his mission. He plots to take the Crown of Cogs from the Time-Keeper and will not tolerate any child getting in his way.

This Pivot studies the influence of Julia Kristeva’s work on American literary and film studies. Chapters consider this influence via such innovative approaches as Hortense Spillers’s and Jack Halberstam’s to Paule Marshall’s fiction and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, respectively. The book also considers how critics in the United States receive Kristeva’s work on French feminism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic writing in complex, controversial ways, especially on the question of marginalized populations. Examples include Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo on Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil as well as Frances Restuccia on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Carol Mastrangelo Bové also examines Kristeva’s take on the US in her essays and fiction, which provide a vital part of the dialogue with American critics. Like them, Bové incorporates Kristeva’s thought in her own creative readings of little-known authors and directors including Christiane Rochefort, Nancy Savoca, and Frank Lentricchia.

Gretchen Lauterbach travels to Brevard, where she meets Zachary, an American ex-pat living in France who deals in antiquities...decidedly unusual antiquities. This collection of three short stories features the backstories of the cursed items from Beneath the Morvan Moon. In "Le Meneur Des Loups", Zachary possesses a cloak rumored to have the power to transform a man into a wolf that Pascal, a Brevardian, wants for his collection of lycanthropic memorabilia. Europeans have a history of suffering due to wolves. Thus it was wolves and werewolves, or loup garous, came to be among the most feared beasts in French folklore, as did Le Meneur de Loops, the Wizard of the Wolves, responsible for commanding the wolves on their missions of terror. But were the legends merely that? "The Clockmaker" tells the tale of a clock Zachary discovers in Pascal's shop that chimes only when Death is near. Finally, "Casting On, Binding Off" features a pair of knitting needles that almost kill Zachary.

The Enchanted Hill is a western novel by famous author Peter B. Kyne. He was born and died in San Francisco, California. More than 100 films were adapted into screenplays. Kyne created the character of Cappy Ricks in a series of novels. Excerpt: "San Onofre was accustomed to silence. It was a flag station in the heart of El Valle de los Ojos Negros, and over it and the cattle corrals and loading chute, the complaining windmill and a five-thousand-gallon water-tank kept guard. It boasted neither station agent nor station loafers; even the trains did not stop there to take on water, for the windmill and tank had been erected by the railroad company to supply water to the transient herds of cattle held in the corrals for car shipment, and for the horses and men who drove the cattle thither. Hence, except on those occasions when the cow-men who ranged in El Valle de los Ojos Negros and the public grazing lands in the forest reserve to the north and northeast drove their beef cattle in for shipment, no human voice competed in San Onofre with the zephyr, the grasshoppers, the crows and the woodpecker..."

When Jo, Bessie and Fanny leap over a ditch near their new house in the country, they find themselves in an Enchanted Wood where trees whisper their secrets and magic is everywhere. In the middle of the wood grows the most wonderful tree in the world - The Faraway Tree, with its top-most branches touching the clouds, magical fruit, the exciting Slippery-Slip, and cosy houses set in its vast trunk. The children soon explore the tree, meeting the strange people who live there, including Moon-Face, Silky the pixie and Dame Washalot, and have amazing adventures in the lands that come and go at the top - the Land of Ice and Snow, the Land of the Three Bears, and everyone's favourite - the Land of Take-What-You-Want!