A Novel That Disrupts a Fundamental Law of the Universe

Some years after his theory of relativity changed our fundamental understanding of the concept of time, Einstein wrote that “there is no audible tick-tock everywhere in the world that can be considered time.” What he meant was that timekeeping as we understand it—the seconds, minutes, and hours meted out to us precisely by our clocks—does not exist in any physical way. Clock time is a human invention, a system that we impose upon the world in an attempt to maintain, for our own sanity, some semblance of order.

Time in fiction works in a similar way—except that in books, the writer alone controls the organizational system, measuring out time through sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, and moving it in service to the plot. It is only in fiction that time travel—or the stopping of time altogether—is really possible; the reader can start a page on one day and end it in a different year. In her seven-part novel On the Calculation of Volume (the first two books of which are now out in English, as translated by Barbara J. Haveland), the Danish writer Solvej Balle pushes the writer’s privilege to its limit. Balle’s protagonist, Tara Selter, is a rare-book dealer in France who has found herself trapped within a time loop, a ruminative version of Groundhog Day that sees her endlessly repeating one day, the same day, over and over: November 18.

“Every night when I lie down to sleep … it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November,” Tara explains near the beginning of Balle’s first installment (which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Translated Literature this year). On the Calculation of Volume is a book of hours in its most literal sense, a diary in which Tara tallies each of her November 18ths and her attempts, both hopeful and despairing, to break free from the cycle she is trapped within. Having left the northern French town where she and Thomas, her husband and business partner, run an antique-book business in order to attend an auction in Paris, Tara inexplicably wakes up one morning in a baffling scenario. Time “has fallen apart,” and Tara’s days are repeating themselves, a fact that becomes clear to her when she watches a fellow hotel guest drop a piece of bread at breakfast at the exact time and place he had done so the morning before. Tara’s observations display an increasing sense of desperation over the course of the first book and some of the second as she tries to come to terms with her new reality.

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There are no more yesterdays in Tara’s life, and no tomorrows either. Instead, there is a fluid but constant present with its own internal set of rules. Certain objects travel with Tara as she repeats her November 18ths, like the notebooks—part captain’s log and part prison diary—in which she records each day’s events. Yet, in contrast with most popular iterations of the time-loop genre, her physical location remains unconstrained: If she falls asleep in a different city from the one in which she began her day, Tara will remain in this new place come morning, rather than be transported back to her hotel room in Paris.

But these rules apply only to Tara, not to anyone else. To the other characters, time seems to be progressing normally, but each time the clock strikes midnight, the day spins backwards and wipes the slate—and their memories—clean. Only Tara is able to remember what happened during the previous iteration of November 18; Thomas, for instance, approaches each November 18 as if it were his first. In a poignant sequence in the first book, Tara is confronted, each morning, with having to explain to Thomas what has happened, and what will occur again. “We could not find the mistake,” Tara writes. “We could find patterns and we could find inconsistencies.” In the second volume, she will have to do this with her parents too. A listless acceptance will follow, as Tara attempts to forget herself as an individual with a past. “This is how I pass my days: I throw myself into the crowd, I let myself be carried along, I am in motion … once I have emerged from the metro stations or landed on the sidewalk at a bus stop, I lose momentum. I slow down, stop.” The meaning is clear: Without external cues that time is passing, life—even on the page—pauses.

On the Calculation of Volume’s premise could, in other hands, be reduced to a gimmick. But in Haveland’s rendering, Balle’s stripped-down prose has an understated clarity that lends philosophical resonance to this fantastical setup. Both of these volumes move swiftly; their briefness (each is less than 200 pages) is at odds with the feeling of unendingness that attends Tara’s predicament. Balle’s work disrupts one of the foundational laws of the universe: that time moves forward. Only the act of writing allows Tara to feel some control over her time again. “That is why I began to write,” Tara notes near the beginning of the first novel. “Because time has fallen apart. Because I found a ream of paper on the shelf. Because I’m trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.” But without other people experiencing the same events beside her, do any of her actions matter? Without time, life becomes static, a repetitive series of journal entries all marked with the same date.

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In the first volume, Tara is still attempting to understand the new order in which she must now structure her life; by its end, she is resigned to her fate and yet proactive about how she will exist within it. “There is something underneath my November day,” she muses toward the first book’s conclusion, “and the woods tug at me as if it wishes me to stay. It clings to the soles of my boots, it wants to tell me about September and October.” A different sort of time exists outside the one dictated by the calendar: the cycle that belongs to nature, reflected in the changing seasons. Tara will, in the second book, devise a clever plan to experience a year’s worth of weather thanks to Europe’s varying climates. By traveling via train to different countries in tune with imagined seasons—both the warmer southern locales and the colder northern ones—Tara will find a way to feel time passing. But this is of course only an imitation of linearity.

As an antiquarian book dealer, Tara makes her life’s work out of the written word, but her connection to books is passive; her profession demands that she regard them as purely physical objects. “My relationship with books has always lain in the eyes and the hands,” she admits at one point. But by recording her days, Tara becomes a writer herself. And though the plot of her life may have run away from her, her diary keeping imposes order once again. In chronicling the events of her repeating days, Tara performs the kind of time travel that only writing—not science or technology or engineering—can. She creates a beginning and a middle—and hopefully, eventually, an end.