This 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.
... a playful, intimate, and deeply insightful collection ... defies categorization ... Julavits' insatiable drive for adventure energizes these stories. Her prose, which is clear, thoughtful and smart, illustrates the life of a woman who is both silly and serious ... The style of the book allows Julavits to explore and retreat rather than fully excavate, perhaps in a way that a memoir would not ... These stories display the work of a vivid, active, ever-questioning imagination.
... [Julavits] takes moments in time and blows them up with thought and introspection and tangential relations. She condenses them down into polished nuggets ... Immediately Julavits is winsome and likable on the page. She pre-empts all envy and repulsion by anticipating the reader’s potential reaction ... She is a narrator who is concerned with her presentation of self, but she manages to expose herself in a full-ish portrait, highlighting both her anxieties and petty humanness, and celebrating her own wit, resourcefulness and tenacity ... [Julavits] has looked at her world so thoroughly for so long, and the richness of accumulated time, the way cream rises to the top when milk settles, gives The Folded Clock a rooted sense of intimacy with the writer ... At times the more serious side of me wanted the author to take on heavier material. But her mind is so smart and delightful and open that even her missives on garage sale savvy and swimming and watching The Bachelorette opened up caverns of musings about life, death, and anxieties.
Julavits’ version is confessional, certainly, but it is also a work of finely tuned artifice, an unashamed performance of privacy ... By the end you come to realise that this is a work of careful, conscious assembly — a life told in tessellated pieces, fitting perfectly together. The effect is closer to reading an essayistic memoir than that of stumbling on a locked notebook in a drawer ... Of course, it’s all the better for it. All that artifice adds up to a truer depiction of the interior self than the 'authentic' version ... In a hyperactive excess of thought and counter-thought, the only thing that feels occasionally lacking is mundanity. At times the entries read like the witty and neurotic accompaniment to an Instagram feed, all ocean swims, picturesque graveyards and slightly awkward encounters with German artists. You’re grateful when she writes about being in a supermarket ... By offering a release from linear experience, Julavits rearranges her life so that it assumes a new pattern — one that is entirely contrived and yet, in its way, revelatory.
Julavits does not go the route of the confessional that is popular these days; instead, she slyly reveals anecdotes and reminiscences from which her personality can be gleaned ... These entries are polished. There is none of the sloppy, ripped-from-the-handwritten-pages oversentimentalism that can sometimes define a diary ... There is glorious slippage, just enough to see its author in the various stages of her life, adhering to the truth as she sees it.
... demonstrates how the flat daily record of a diary can offer unexpected creative possibilities ... The disrupted chronology throws up unexpected connections and coincidences, which are themselves a way of collapsing time and reordering the world, and, depending on your frame of mind, can mean everything or nothing ... Many of [Julavits'] anecdotes are outlandish, drawing moral lines in unexpected places, and delivered with a deadpan wit ... Both the humor and the pathos of the book arise from this mismatch between the urgency of a decision in the moment and the awareness that always runs beneath it: that time will eventually make most things not matter.
... these carefully composed, often intimate mini-essays have more in common with blogs and Facebook posts than with either Montaigne or private, uncensored inky outpourings ... replaces slavish chronological record-keeping with a playfulness that allows Julavits to thumb her nose at time ... oddly exhilarating. Freed from the day-in-day-out drudgery of linear chronology, we come to recognize the rhythm of Julavits' overstuffed, fortunate life ... There's plenty that's baldly confessional and some that's cringe-worthy ... This is not an intellectual work; don't look for philosophical contemplations or deep analyses of art ... an engaging portrait of a woman's sense of identity, which continually shape-shifts with time.
... a well-written, sometimes entertaining, occasionally irritating portrait of an intelligent and accomplished woman struggling with identity and aging ... a profound subtext emerges: the diary as a way to collect time and stave off existential dread.
... intricate and delicately worked ... Once the reader understands that this is no ordinary diary in which life is sliced into manageable chunks, the fun begins ... The magic of The Folded Clock is the way it recaptures time, slowing and bending it, to create something new: art from life ... By connecting these units of daily life, Julavits transforms her diary into an exceptional work of art.
... offers proof positive, as if it were needed, that [Julavits] is, indeed, a dyed-in-the-wool writer ... She shares her fascinations in easy, non-sequential, what-I-did-today essays that cover the amusing and comical—toy stethoscopes and how to pee, or not, into an airsick bag—as well as the philosophical, including the nature of gift giving. Julavits is thoughtful, imaginative, funny, and always entertaining.
... feels like both a consideration of and an inoculation against the basic meh-ness of adulthood. In Julavits’s rendering, the tedious grown-up chores, social obligations, and life-management tasks that, if we’re honest, make up great swaths of our waking hours are coated in a sticky syrup of potential.
Some entries are slyly funny, gossipy and irreverent; others, quietly intimate, reveal recurring depression and anxiety ... An inventive, beautifully crafted memoir, wise and insightful.
It’s no accident that so many of her entries describe dinner parties, because Julavits sounds like the ideal dinner-party guest, always regaling you with exotic travel tales, dishy gossip about her friends, and funny stories—such as the time she tried to urinate into an airsickness bag on a plane. At its best, The Folded Clock is what all great diaries end up being: a profound meditation on the passing of time.
... hard to resist ... there is no plot. These entries explore the mundane and, at times, are tedious but the overall effect is brilliant. Like an abstract painting that has the viewer thinking, 'My child could have painted this,' Julavits tricks the reader into thinking 'I could have written that,' when in reality her sparse prose is full of gems ... Anyone who has found beauty in the mundane and has questioned how small moments make up a life will enjoy this book.
Display[s] both charm and stark honesty ... The entries aren’t ordered, and many depict Julavits as a not-always-likable woman of privilege. The diary angle makes for a clever hook, but masks what this really is—a compelling collection of intimate, untitled personal essays that reveal one woman’s ever-evolving soul.
