The 13 Clocks
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| Author | James Thurber |
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| Illustrator | Marc Simont |
| Cover artist | Marc Simont |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
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Publication date
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January 1, 1950 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 124 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 25330722 |
The 13 Clocks is a fantasy tale written by James Thurber in 1950, while he was completing one of his other novels. It is written in a unique cadenced style, in which a mysterious prince must complete a seemingly impossible task to free a maiden from the clutches of an evil duke. It invokes many fairy tale motifs.
The story is noted for Thurber's constant, complex wordplay, and his use of an almost continuous internal meter, with occasional hidden rhymes — akin to blank verse, but with no line breaks to advertise the structure. Other fantasy books by Thurber, such as Many Moons, The Wonderful O (published 1958), and particularly The White Deer, also contained hints of this unusual prose form, but here it becomes a universal feature of the text, to the point where it is possible to predict the word order for a given phrase (for example, "the Golux said" vs. "said the Golux") by looking at the pattern of emphasis in the preceding phrase.
By the time he wrote this book, Thurber was blind, so he could not draw cartoons for the book, as he had done with The White Deer five years earlier. He enlisted his friend Marc Simont to illustrate the original edition. The Golux is said to wear an "indescribable hat". Thurber made Simont describe all his illustrations, and was satisfied when Simont was unable to describe the hat. When it was reissued by Puffin Books, it was illustrated by Ronald Searle. The book has been reprinted by The New York Review Children's Collection, with original illustrations by Marc Simont and an introduction by Neil Gaiman.
The evil Duke of Coffin Castle lives with his good and beautiful niece, the princess Saralinda. A few days before Saralinda's twenty-first birthday, Prince Zorn of Zorna arrives in the town disguised as a minstrel named Xingu. After meeting an enigmatic character known as the Golux, who declares his intention to help Zorn rescue the Princess, Zorn gets himself arrested and imprisoned.
The Duke gives Zorn the task of finding a thousand jewels. However, the Duke was aware of Zorn's identity all along; therefore, to prevent Zorn from simply traveling to his father's kingdom and back again, the Duke only allows him 99 hours to complete the task. To complicate things further, the Duke commands that when Zorn returns, the thirteen irrevocably frozen clocks in the castle must all be striking five.
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Wikipedia