A woman travels to Paris from her small town of Clairon-sous-Bois in the north of France; she is an antiquarian bookseller on a normal business trip. It is the eighteenth of November. She purchases books, sees a friend who deals in rare coins, buys a Roman sestertius, burns her hand on a radiator, returns to her hotel, calls her husband, and goes to sleep. She wakes up in the morning. It is the eighteenth of November.
So begins the strange journey of Tara Selter, narrator of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, a novel in seven parts. Five of these have been published so far in Danish, with two now translated by Barbara Haveland for New Directions. For Tara, every day is the eighteenth of November.
The novel is told in journal form, beginning on the eighteenth of November #121. Tara is, by then, sequestered in the guest bedroom of her home in Clairon. The first several entries, through the eighteenth of November #124, are primarily her recollection of events to that point. After waking to find the day repeating itself, Tara flees home, surprising her husband, Thomas, who believes her explanation without doubt. However, the following morning, it is once more the eighteenth of November, and Thomas has forgotten everything. So go the early eighteenths of November.
Despite the feeling that the logic of the world has broken down, Tara and Thomas settle into a pattern, living each day in an unlikely state of bliss, with days as warm and hazy as the beautiful nebula-like images on the books’ covers (designed by Matt Dorfman). Yet Tara must offer her husband the fruit of knowledge not once but constantly, daily, and as the eighteenths of November slip into subjective months, she awakes one morning to feel that the warm haze has dissipated. The sharp fact remaining is that, with Thomas remembering only an increasingly distant seventeenth of November, the gap between their lives has grown too great. Eventually, unable to discover or treat the cause of the phenomenon, Tara breaks and retreats to the guest room and her solitary contemplations.
For many English-language readers, the first reference for time loop stories will be the 1993 film Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray. Balle takes the proposition in a profoundly different direction, however. While the eighteenth of November repeats exactly around her, with all other persons resuming their positions and momentum at the start of each day, Tara herself has become unmoored in time. She may travel and awake in new places. Just as her mind and memory may evolve from day to day, changes may accumulate in the rest of her body too. Injuries—like her burn—persist, healing normally over time. She ages. And, most striking, there is an exception to the daily resetting of the world around her—if she consumes something, it is gone forever. This phenomenon leads Tara to frequently contemplate her own monstrosity, a capacity for devouring the world around her.
There is an ecological theme here, certainly. Changes in climate are mentioned several times throughout the two volumes, and it is an inescapable fact of our time that humanity’s endless capacity for consumption has led to mass extinction, pollution, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, and the looming collapse of the most advanced systems of the Earth’s biosphere. But Tara’s contemplation of the monstrosity of consumption brings, at least to my mind, questions about the consumptive nature of life itself. What is an organism, if not an adaptive chemical reaction which increases entropy in a system? And what is the mental condition of such an organism that becomes aware of its monstrosity?
With nothing to do but contemplate her path of destruction and obsessively track the sounds of Thomas’s daily movements, Tara experiences an acceleration of consciousness. Days pass quickly, blending together. “How long can my little world endure me?” she asks. She begins to range further afield, shopping at new grocery stores, looking for the food that will be least missed, and eventually moves out of the guest room and into an empty house.
The first book ends as Tara returns to Paris. She can feel the “real” dates running beneath the endless eighteenths of November, and she hopes to jump back into real time on the anniversary of her first trip. It is the night of her eighteenth of November #366. She has lived a year in a day and waits expectantly for the coming of morning. Were this first book to stand alone, it would make for a satisfying if ambiguous ending—a long descent into alienation, capped with a moment of hope, of the possibility of escape.
The book does not stand alone, however, and—stop now if you don’t want to know—the second book of On the Calculation of Volume begins with the revelation that Tara wakes the next morning to the eighteenth of November #367. Her plan did not work, and she despairs that she has fallen out of time irrevocably.
I will admit to some skepticism following the end of the first book. The concept and character felt well-explored and the ending well-executed. What could remain but unnecessary iteration? What follows, however, is a remarkable twist on the novel’s first part: If Tara cannot return to regular time, then she will construct that time in parallel. She will keep track of the days she should be having and will seek pieces of those days in the eighteenth of November. She will pursue the seasons, heading north for winter. She will make a surprise visit to her parents, bearing gifts for Christmas, and will drink champagne on New Year’s Eve. She will go to Cornwall, since she hears that the farmers there lamb in autumn and the fields can be mistaken for spring. She will travel south to Spain for summer and dance through the night.
Tara begins to keep two journals: the one we are reading and another we never see, which makes no mention of her plight and tracks her days as they should be. She is building a true year in her day, or as close as she can get. While the novel’s first part forms a self-contained circuit, this second is an open arc, where Tara, first unmoored in time, now becomes unmoored in space.
While no explanation for the time loop is offered in the first two books, Tara treats the phenomenon with a pragmatic rigor. Through trial and error, she works out operations for acclimating new clothing and possessions to her body, so they will follow her past the nebulous demarcation point between days (which exists somewhere in the early hours of the morning). She is wary of airplanes or ships traveling through the night. As she moves, she makes sure to stay in hotel rooms not occupied the prior night, so as to not wake up in bed with a stranger. All the details of where to go and what to do on each “day” go into her new journal, so she can retrace her steps in the coming years of her life.
Balle’s writing, as translated by Haveland, is clean and clear, believable as that of an educated woman contemplating her life. It is therefore even more impactful when she slips into stylistically unusual passages, as in the page-long paragraph where Tara describes a kaleidoscopic journey through a London supermarket’s produce section, where the overwhelming abundance is its own kind of desolation.
Always, Tara is aware of her own monstrosity, of what she is expending and consuming. But so long as she stays on the move, varying her feeding places, she is able to limit her impact. Surrounded by a sedentary world, where every day is—literally—lived in the same manner, Tara’s seasonal migration reprises a more ancient way of life. Here, perhaps, is the beginning of a solution to the ecological question—a fundamental shift in one’s way of life. Or this might be a solution, if it could last. But, when disaster strikes and she loses her book of seasons, it is suddenly the eighteenth of November once more and nothing else. She falls into a depression and long stretches pass between brief journal entries, with a hundred days elapsing in the space of three or four pages. Here, living in yet another empty home, Tara falls into a contemplation of time that begins to strike at the title of the novel: “Here there is only a neutral, gentle November day, because my time is not a circle and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a pool, a vessel, a container.”
Tara falls into a long, obsessive episode focused on her Roman sestertius, the ancient coin bought, lost, and regained over the course of the first book and then carried with her, almost unnoticed, until this moment. For nearly two hundred days, she compulsively researches the Romans, leading to a break with reality in which she sees herself living in Roman times, when every act was consumption and every object was a container. The nature of the coin as object and gateway and mirror carries a certain irony for an antiquarian bookseller who, prior to this sudden turn, had admitted a disinterest in history. Her trade is not primarily in knowledge or literature, but in that very object nature of the books, of what their age and construction represent. It is the transmutation of time into an object fit for (commercial) consumption. Thomas, for whom the coin had been meant as a gift, had been a lover of history—but, for Tara, the draw was in the physicality of the object itself: as the feeling of the paper in a book, so the stamp of the metal on a coin.
Volume is a calculation of length by breadth by depth. If Tara Selter’s first year was a lesson on the impossible length of a day, her seasonal journey was in turn a study in the breadth of a day that could contain all parts of a year, and here, now, it is the depth of that time which remains.
What new dimensions can await in books III to VII? We are given a hint as the second book closes on the eighteenth of November #1144 with a revelation that suggests more has been going on than we have understood so far. I, for one, have fallen into the eighteenth of November and am in no rush to find my way out.
[Editor's Note: Publication of this review was made possible by a gift from Handy Haversack during our annual Kickstarter.]