I have counted the days. It is my 122nd eighteenth of November. I have come a long way from the seventeenth and I do not know whether I will ever see the nineteenth. But the eighteenth arrives again and again.
This is life for Tara Selter, the protagonist of On the Calculation of Volume, a mesmerising projected septology by the Danish writer Solvej Balle that will make anyone who has ever longed to pause time rethink their wish list.
Book I, published in Denmark in 2020 and on this year’s International Booker Prize longlist, opens on Day 121. Tara, an antiquarian bookseller, is hiding from her husband Thomas in the spare room of their cottage in Clairon-sous-Bois, a fictional town in northern France. She follows his movements by the sounds he makes, from the gush of water through the pipes when he fills a kettle to the faint click when he turns on the gas. She is hiding because she can’t face explaining to him – yet again – how she fell through a rift in time one autumn morning in Paris, while away for two nights on a book-buying trip.
Despite burning her hand on an old gas heater, everything had gone to plan, until waking on what should have been 19 November at the Hôtel du Lison, Tara’s regular Parisian bolthole. First, the newspaper had the same stories as the previous day. Then, at breakfast, Tara watched the same hotel guest drop the same slice of white bread as the previous morning. It was the same day, happening all over again. ‘The weather, too, was the same. It had rained while I was having breakfast, but the sky had now cleared.’ Balle’s taut prose is crisply rendered into English by Barbara J. Haveland, who translated Balle’s first book, According to the Law, in the early 1990s.
If the Groundhog Day premise is deceptively simple, the execution is anything but, as Balle constructs a viable world where the far-fetched rings true. ‘The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences,’ writes Tara, who keeps a journal because ‘I’m trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.’ The frequent repetitive syntax accentuates each day’s circularity.
Tara’s new world operates to a set of rules. Her physical location at the start of each new 18 November remains where she is at the end of the day, but objects are more transient. She has to train items to stay with her, often by sleeping with them under her pillow. Everyone else starts each 18 November afresh – hence Tara’s fatigue at repeating her unlikely story to Thomas. The biggest issue is the dent she makes on resources. She is a ‘monster’ devouring the world. Aren’t we all?
In Book II, which she is writing from some unimaginable point in the future, Tara goes in search of calendrical seasons to give her endless 18 November a semblance of normality. ‘If I am to have a future, I will have to build it myself,’ she writes. She heads north for early snow, and south for late sun before realising her quest is pointless.
Over the first two volumes to appear in English (a third will follow this autumn), Balle constructs such a plausible account of how time could break down that I am utterly discombobulated upon waking after reading through the night while away in my own foreign hotel. Throw in a 30-year anniversary alumni reunion at my old university, where time very much has and hasn’t stood still, and I am ready to believe that time really is a relative concept.
‘What the best novels can do is open up spaces,’ said Karl Ove Knausgard of Balle’s achievement. Now 62, Balle originally had the idea in 1987, but spent decades working on the first book, which she published herself in 2020, along with the following four. The series became a word-of-mouth sensation in Denmark and Balle is now writing the last two instalments. I only hope she keeps up the pace. And that Tara thinks about paying the International Date Line a visit.
Comments