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As a young woman, Solvej Balle was obsessed by James Joyce’s Ulysses — a doorstopper that takes place on a single day — marvelling to herself, “how can one day be so voluminous?” The first instalment of On the Calculation of Volume was fittingly released in Danish in 2020 — when the world was stuck in the Groundhog Day of pandemic lockdowns — but Balle’s idea for a time-loop novel had been germinating since 1987.
How many iterations of a day can we watch a character experience without it getting boring? In the right hands, quite a few. The first three books of Balle’s planned septology were awarded the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize. Book I, in its translation by Barbara J Haveland, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025 and in the UK it has recently been shortlisted for Blackwell’s book of the year.
Our protagonist is Tara Selter, a rare books dealer in northern France who wakes up to find herself living November 18th on repeat. For the first two books, she is alone in her predicament, moving away from her husband Thomas when the gap between their lived experiences becomes too wide. At first, Tara searches for a glitch in the pattern to return to linear time. In Volume II, also translated by Haveland, she gradually comes to terms with her situation. Stuck in time but not in place (she wakes up wherever she had gone to sleep), Tara tries to replicate the seasons of the year by travelling.
Volume II left readers on a cliffhanger, with Tara in a café waiting to meet a man called Henry Dale, a Norwegian sociologist who is stuck in the same day. Volume III, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, picks up where the story left off. “I have met someone who remembers,” Tara shares excitedly on day #1144, after more than three years’ worth of November 18ths. The pair delight in the company of someone who can offer the “little mental jolt” of mutual recognition and they quickly move in together.
The conversation between the characters allows Balle, who holds a degree in philosophy, to expand on existential reflections. At first, Henry had used his days to catch up on his to-do list, until he realised that his “obsession with work was pointless” as it was “swallowed up into a vast digital void” overnight. Recognising that in the regular world, “everything would have disappeared anyway, only more slowly”, he greets the clean slate of “a day that made no assertions of progress and propulsion and promotion” with relief. Tara, meanwhile, mourns the future she might have had, whether seeing a garden grow or bringing a child into the world.
Although they live together companionably, Henry begins to miss his five-year-old son, who lives in upstate New York with his mother and her new boyfriend. He and Tara agree to part ways and meet again in a “centium” — 100 days. With Henry away, Tara becomes nostalgic for “the sounds surfacing from memory” of her life with her husband. She returns to their home but as before, while Thomas believes her, she can’t convince him to come with her to try to find a way out, and “the sheer number of days” between them makes the distance feel “insurmountable”. “I have got the sounds back, but that’s all,” she laments. “I have not got Thomas back. I do not have our foggy days back. I have the birds’ short morning riffs, the sound of rain.”
Formatted in a series of diary entries, On the Calculation of Volume is a meditation not only on time but on presence. We luxuriate in Tara’s acuity of attention — all the more compelling as our own capacity to focus is in freefall in our internet-addled, algorithm-driven lives. She takes pleasure in returning to listen to the same concerts, for example. “Each time there are other sounds: a hidden instrument, a note unfurling in the background, a marginal sound I hadn’t heard before, an unusual timbre, an unexpected echo.” (It is a testament to the talent of the translators, as well as the lucid quality of Balle’s prose, that the passing of the baton between books is imperceptible.)
The novels also touch on environmental themes. A deep dive into the fall of the Roman empire prompts Tara to reflect on the Romans’ resources and scarcity thereof. “For who could doubt that we live in a time which resembles theirs? That we are the Romans, heading for disaster.” Whereas she tries to stave off the feeling that they are “using up the world” by buying groceries past their sell-by dates, Henry is more inclined to move to a different hotel when the buffet breakfast runs out of “little packets of apricot jam”, unconvinced that eating “rubbish” will make any difference.
The second part of the book shifts the emphasis entirely to societal concerns, as two new characters join Tara and Henry. A young activist named Olga appears at the door, desperately searching for another man she’d met in the loop, Ralf Kern, who is determined to change the course of events. Olga and Ralf are less worried about the temporal loop than “everything else, the constant stream of accidents and tragedies, people getting injured, illness and misfortune, cruelty, injustice and poverty”. While Ralf is obsessed with his mission of “preventing all the accidents in the world”, Olga believes they should work for systemic change.
Like Book II, the end of Book III also leaves readers with a peek at what’s to come, as a knock on the door reveals five more people stuck in the loop of November 18th. To be released in April, On the Calculation of Volume IV will zoom the lens even wider, as the group tries to form a social movement. “Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization?” the press releases teases. Only time will tell.
On the Calculation of Volume Book III by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell Faber £12.99/New Directions $15.95, 208 pages
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