On the Calculation of Volume (Books III and IV) by Solvej Balle
Last month, during Rosh Hashanah, we read the story in Genesis in which God tests Abraham by commanding him to offer up his son Isaac as a sacrifice, only for an angel to intervene at the last moment.
This year, I lingered over a detail of this story — one of the most famous and disturbing in the entire Torah — that I had never noticed before. After Abraham sets off with Isaac and two servants to fulfill God's command, the narrative skips ahead to the third day of their journey, when Isaac’s near-death occurs. Stories frequently elide time to keep the pace brisk. But why does the Torah deliberately omit the second day, when Abraham must have been filled with anguish, dread and, possibly, second thoughts? And if narrative time diverges from real time, do the days that go unmentioned carry any meaning?
All of this brings me back to the mind-bending conception of time at the heart of On the Calculation of Volume, the seven-volume novel I’ve been singing the praises of this year. This inventive series from Danish author Solvej Balle takes place on an endlessly repeating November 18, as protagonist Tara Selter tries to cope with the loneliness, bewilderment and logistical challenges of being stuck in time. Tara also skips days in her narration, sometimes by a lot, although the day always remains November 18, in an unspecified year.
Regular readers may recall why I picked up these books in the first place: November 18 happens to be my birthday, so I was curious why Balle chose to set her story on that day. I immediately fell in love with this series, which feels like something completely fresh and innovative in fiction (see my posts on Books I and II here and here). I’ve now read the third and fourth installments, which are similar to each other thematically, so it seems fitting to discuss them together.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
A quick summary: In Book I, we meet Tara, a woman in rural France who begins living November 18 again and again, while her husband continues to exist in linear time. Book II chronicles Tara's increasing isolation and loneliness, as she spends a year traveling across Europe solo in search of a change of seasons and a deeper understanding of her predicament. At the end of the book, she makes the tantalizing discovery that someone else may also be trapped in the same time loop.
Book III opens with Tara meeting this person, a Norwegian academic named Henry Dale. They become companions. It's not a romantic pairing, but a coming together of two people processing similar circumstances. The book concludes with the revelation that even more people dwell in November 18, although it’s unclear how many or why.
The fourth book opens where the third one left off, with the group setting up a commune of sorts in Germany. As their circle grows, a sense of normality takes hold, with the days filled with chores and conversation. Some despair over the lives they left behind, while others enjoy their atypical existence — no one has to go to work, and two of them fall in love. The housemates engage in long, intellectual discussions, such as how they should describe themselves. Are they loopers, or repeaters, or perhaps, returners? They never land on anything, since there is no precise term in any language to encapsulate their baffling existence. They also unsuccessfully try to come up with new measures of time, as days, weeks and years no longer seem appropriate.
While I enjoyed reading Books III and IV overall, the emergence of so many new people on the scene left me missing the close connection I developed with Tara in Books 1 and II. Many of these new characters seem interchangeable; at one point, one of them observes that they all come from similar backgrounds — not old, not young, not rich, not poor, and, in most cases, childless. Their world views are homogenous. They are all humanists who seek scientific and philosophical explanations for their predicament. No one seems remotely religious; the presence of such a character could have added a fascinating dynamic to their debates about time, space and one's purpose on Earth.
Balle is skillful at introducing a bit of intrigue at the end of each book. After broadening the cast of characters and speeding up the timeline, Book IV ends with a renewed focus on Tara and the husband she left behind. I'm looking forward to picking up with the story when Book V is released in English translation later this year.
As for why Balle chose my birthday for her magnum opus, I finally have an answer, although it’s not a satisfying one. In an interview on a podcast, she explained that she chose November 18 at random; she wanted a date in the late fall for the plot, and she settled on this one. Alas, I was hoping her choice was tied to some sort of celestial phenomenon or world-shaping event. But that’s OK. There remains a much bigger mystery that I'm counting on her to resolve: Will Tara and her friends ever make it to November 19?
