RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis diary is a diary in the way that Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater is a confession, or that Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is a journal, meaning it is, and it isn’t ... The result is that each day feels very full, although little happens. And this fullness becomes a reminder of how a life can be improved by the passing of time. The Folded Clock is, among other things, an ode to maturity ... happily plotless, though it is not without narrative, and certainly not shapeless ... The intricate structure calls to mind fractal patterns or Renaissance sketches of eddying water, and the real achievement here may be that Julavits manages to make it appear unintentional. The order does not feel made, but found ... particularly dependent on the well-crafted persona of its narrator — witty, sly, critical, inventive and adventurous ... Her prose is especially liquid, and her sentences are unimpeachable. Julavits is not only a novelist, of course, but also an accomplished essayist ... a work so artful that it appears to be without artifice. This diary is a record of the interior weather of an adept thinker. In it, the mundane is rendered extraordinary through the alchemy of effortless prose. It is a work in which a self is both lost and found, but above all made.
