Review: On the Calculation of Volume I, by Solvej Balle

Review: On the Calculation of Volume I, by Solvej Balle

by Rich Horton

This is the first of a planned seven volumes of a long novel. Solvej Balle is a Danish writer who has been well-regarded in her home country for decades, to the point that she has received a lifetime grant from the Danish Arts Foundation. Her first novel, Lyrefugl (The Lyre Bird) appeared in 1986. For the next three decades she published poetry, nonfiction, a memoir, and four volumes of "short prose", & (1990), Hvis (If) (2013), Så (Then) (2013), and  Ifolge loven, fire beretninger om mennesket (According the the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind) (1993). As far as I know, only the last book has been translated into English, and it seems to the book that established her reputation. (I'm not entirely sure whether the other collectons of short prose comprise short stories or essays or both.)

The first book of On the Calculation of Volume appeared in Denmark as Om udregning af rumfangin in 2020, though evidently Balle conceived the story in the '80s and began writing it in 1999.  It was translated into English and published by New Directions last year. By now, five books have been published in Denmark, and the first four have been published in English. The first two volumes are translated quite ably by Barbara Haveland, who also translated According to the Law. The third and fourth books are translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. Each book is quite short -- the first one is 161 pages, perhaps 45,000 words. Still -- the final work will be over 300,000 words, big by any standard. 

I have read just the first book so far. It is narrated by Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller living with her husband in a small town in northern France. She opens by describing her life as of day #121. "There is someone in the house." But it's not horror, not a thriller -- the someone is her husband. And Tara lives, it seems, in the spaces her husband does not. But not because she's alienated from him or anything -- she still loves him and misses him. But it is the 121st time she has experienced November 18. 

We learn the story: she had gone on a short trip to Bordeaux for an auction, and then to Paris, to pick up some books they had ordered, to look for others -- and, as it turns out, to visit an old friend, a coin seller, and his new girlfriend. She went to sleep in the hotel room -- and woke up in the same room, but back to the start of November 18. She realizes this fairly quickly, and relives the day in Paris, with some changes, and realizes she's stuck in a time loop. So she heads back home, and remains in the loop. After several days explaining and re-explaining this to her husband, and trying variations on her routine to see if somehow she can break out of the loop, she has retreated to the spare bedroom, and has started living in the interstices of her husband's life -- going out shopping or walking where she knows he won't be, making tea and eating at times he won't hear her, and so on. 

And, in a way, that's the book. Which seems kind of boring -- and, to be honest, I was bored for stretches of the book. But there were other stretches that really worked. Some of the scenes are strikingly beautiful, and affecting. Tara's observations -- her detailed learning of everything she can about her house, her husband's routine, their yard, the weather and the stars and so on of November 18th -- gain a, well, volume of impact. The philsophical elements are intriguing too -- why is she stuck? Some things stay with her (some of the books she got at auction, for example) and some seem to return to their previous places? She ages a day at a time, but her husband and everyone else is unchanged. Her routine can change -- her waking times, for example; or the exact time that the loop resets. What does it mean that the food she consumes is gone -- so the shelves of stories mysteriously empty even though she only buys enough each day for her needs. 

There are changes as things go -- first the time spent with her husband reliving the day again and again, then the time hiding away in the spare room, then a time when she wanders more widely, even risks meeting her husband on his daily routine, or returning to Paris to try again to break the loop. And eventually she finds a vacant house to occupy. But for all that -- it is, by the end of the book, a year of reliving the same day. I understand that in the subsequent volumes there are more extensive changes to her repeated single day -- travel to other countries, for example.

I liked the book -- at times loved it, but at times labored a bit. But I will continue to the rest of it. There truly is an interesting series of philosophical questionss -- about time, and about the volume one person occupies in time, and about how much one person's changed routines affects people who are reliving the same day over again without remembering the other iterations of the loop. And the question arises -- what about November 19th for everyone else? Does it even exist? If it does, where is Tara? Or can time only continue when she escapes the loop.

As a genre reader, one who has read a great many time loop stories, and seen a number of time loop movies, it's hard not to expect a resolution -- an explanation, or at least an escape. But I'm not at all sure that's where this book is going. It's interested in asking questions; and in observing -- in, somehow, knowing that single day, November 18, more completely. Other reviewiers inevitably compare the book to Groundhog Day, or to the Adam Sandler movie Palm Springs. But if I were to choose a single movie for comparison, it might be The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, a 2021 movie starring Kathryn Newton and Kyle Allen, based on a short story by Lev Grossman -- only because the main characters in that movie, in making their map of perfect things they see on the day they relive, does suggest something of the experience of Tara Selter's close observation of her single day. But in reality, On the Calculation of Volume is something new and different in this familiar subgenre.