French Literature Reviews - 2026
Tiphaine Samoyault, La Montre cassée
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
An essay on the representations of time in literature, cinema, and the visual arts, La Montre cassée (The Broken Watch) sets out to analyze a key scene that has largely gone unnoticed until now. Indeed, in the arts derived from it, the course of time frequently comes to a halt, and the instrument that measures it malfunctions. The scene of the broken watch embodies this very paradox.
Drawing on this intuition, the author traverses different eras and locations to observe its recurrence. Much like those Japanese paper flowers that, when plunged into water, unfold an entire world, the expansion of this motif—ranging from baroque poets to Kōbō Abe, by way of Orson Welles and scholarly horological treatises—ultimately reveals far more than a simple malfunction: acting as a blind spot, the scene of the broken watch allows for the formulation of novel propositions regarding our relationship with temporality.
While evoking the surprise of bringing together these diverse narratives for the first time and intersecting the arts around a single object, La Montre cassée also tells the recent story, with both intimate and collective resonance, of the disruption of time.
Structured into four parts and sixty sequences that replay the turning of a clock face, the book's architecture mirrors its subject, guiding us from the time of stories to the time of clocks, and from subjective time to the suspension of all time.
A theoretical and aesthetic reflection, this essay also borrows from the principles of the anthology, the archive, and the collection—those figures of multiplicity and totalization that run through literary modernity.
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Excerpt:
"Breaking or losing one's watch means stepping aside from time for a moment, separating oneself from it or from what attaches to it, and temporarily losing the continuity of time.
The objects that mark the hours—pendulum clocks, wall clocks, alarm clocks, wristwatches (and formerly sundials, clepsydras, and hourglasses)—are very rarely thrown away. Failing to influence the course of time or to correct the past, we regularly repair the tools that indicate it, keep them when they finally stop working, and preserve them as witnesses to the time they once marked. We remember learning how to tell time, we remember our first watch and the person who gave it to us, and the occasion on which we received it. The less time we have left, the more we rely on these objects of time, which stand as proof that time has passed and that, in passing, it has changed.
Yet, breaking a watch is less about getting rid of time than getting rid of the hours. It means stepping away from measured time to enter another—hypothesizing it or believing in it outright—a time perhaps broader and less fragmented. The fatigue of the hours does not always belong to time itself; it is merely its rhythm, its control, its closure. Consequently, freedom or fiction can only be the widening or opening up of time. Does fiction allow us to escape the mechanics of the hours reflected by language? Hōra in Greek designates any division of time viewed in its cyclic return: a day, a season, or a moment of the day are hours; a meal, bedtime, and a wedding are hours. Even if the imaginary of time as chronology has supplanted that of the cycle, even if we conceive of time as a line rather than a revolution, and even if the hour is no longer a goddess but a discreet vanity, the hour remains the moment and, generally, the right moment. Breaking one's watch means breaking the hour, and the moment.
It means transforming the instant between what was and what will be into a stanza or a stela, suspending flight, and stopping time. The broken watch indicates the absolute instant, devoid of any 'before' or 'after': an instant that will never again be a second. It points to absolute simultaneity, the end of duration.
Languages exhibit notable differences in their attitudes toward the watch. If the watch tells the time (which is the etymology of horloge, as Baudelaire's poem emphasizes), what does the French word montre actually show? Derived from montrer (to show), the French noun montre differs from the English watch, which stems from to watch—meaning to look at or guard (etymologically linked to wake). In both cases, the subject looks at something shown to them; however, whereas in English the object is passive and the emphasis rests on the observing subject, in French the object is active, independently of the subject's gaze. This dual linguistic movement encapsulates the reason for the intense philosophical speculation surrounding watches and clocks, which serve as both driving mechanisms and dials: the fascination stems not only from the presence of an intelligible mechanism, but also from the gaze that reads it.
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Press Review:
Livres hebdo, March 6, 2004, by Jean-Maurice de Montremy
Read the article (or below).
La Croix, April 15, 2004, by Nathalie Crom
La Quinzaine littéraire, May 16, 2004, by Lucette Finas
Le Temps, May 22, 2014, by Luc Debraine
Le Magazine littéraire, August 2004, by Marie-Laure Delorme
Le Figaro, August 12, 2004, by Sébastien Lapaque
Review:
"Around the World of Time in Sixty Phrases", by Jean-Maurice de Montremy, Livres hebdo, March 6, 2004,
When a watch breaks, time goes off course. Tiphaine Samoyault traces the adventures of the broken watch across sixty phrases and twice as many authors or artists. A captivating reflection on aesthetics and fiction.
"Making a book is a trade, just like making a clock," claimed La Bruyère. Starting from this very experience, Tiphaine Samoyault—to whom we recently owe Météorologie du rêve and Les indulgences (Le Seuil, 2000 and 2002)—examines a 'key scene' identified through her reading as well as her research in cinema and the visual arts: the scene of the watch that is broken, lost, stopped, or disordered. Or even melting, quadrangular, without hands or dial, should one venture into the worlds of Dalí or Lewis Carroll.
"Breaking one's watch," she observes, "is less about getting rid of time than getting rid of the hours. It means stepping away from measured time to enter another [...], a time perhaps broader and less fragmented [...]. Does fiction thus allow us to escape the mechanics of the hours reflected by language?" For while language loves to regulate itself like a clock, or make us believe it does, human beings know they possess a body whose inner workings are far less ideally ordered. Granted, we speak of a "biological clock," but that is merely a metaphor. Thus, according to Tiphaine Samoyault, fiction allows us to explore another space—that is to say, another time—and to pose questions similarly explored by philosophy when it engages with logic, language, and truth.
Moreover, her highly original and captivating essay (despite occasional dry passages) presents itself as a "turn of the clock face." It comprises sixty brief sequences, each commenting on a phrase by authors as diverse as Laurence Sterne, Agatha Christie, Claude Simon, Charlie Chaplin, John McGahern, Jules Verne, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Julien Gracq... Not to mention, of course, the indispensable Lewis Carroll and his famous Mad Hatter.
Adding a further constraint, the sixty sequences are naturally organized into four parts: the four quarters of an hour. Each quarter predictably groups fifteen sequences together. With a certain humor, not devoid of melancholy, the final quarter is aptly named the "Bad quarter of an hour" [a difficult moment], since an hour must always eventually be the last one....
However, Tiphaine Samoyault entrusts the sixtieth and final sequence to the fabulous youpketcha [clock-insect] by the Japanese writer Kōbō Abe, which is a watch-insect. The insect stays in one place, devouring its own excrement, which forms a perfect semicircle that it begins to eat at dawn, stopping only at sunset. "The time of fiction is the time of the youpketcha: it is and it is not, much like the universe in which it unfolds." At the sixtieth minute, everything cancels out. Yet already, it begins again.
This fine essay offers a reflection on aesthetics and theory that has become all too rare in literature since the shipwreck of major critical schools. Tiphaine Samoyault does not limit herself solely to her sixty phrases; within each sequence, these phrases prompt numerous other connections. Readers are thus introduced to nearly a hundred and twenty authors or artists whom one feels instantly compelled to discover or rediscover with the curiosity of a ticking second hand."
The exploration of time and its suspension in narrative arts connects with longstanding philosophical and aesthetic inquiries into how human consciousness perceives duration. Across literary history and visual culture, writers and artists have frequently turned to temporal disruption—whether through mechanical failure, memory, or the manipulation of narrative structure—to question the relentless forward march of chronology. By examining works that stage the halting or malfunctioning of timepieces, critical discourse often engages with the ways imaginative texts construct alternative temporalities, separating subjective inner experience from the standardized rhythms imposed by clocks and modern society.
In La Montre cassée, Tiphaine Samoyault explores representations of time across literature, cinema, and the visual arts by analyzing the recurring motif of the broken watch. The text notes that the essay traverses different eras and locations, engaging with baroque poets, Kōbō Abe, Orson Welles, and scholarly horological treatises. Structured into four parts and sixty sequences, the work functions as a theoretical and aesthetic reflection that also draws upon the principles of the anthology, the archive, and the collection. Readers interested in the intersection of temporal motifs, media studies, and aesthetic theory may find it relevant.