Solvej Balle's day without end

New Statesman​

01-05-2025

Photo by Judit Nilsson / SvD / TT
Tara Selter runs an antiquarian books business with her husband, Thomas. They live on the outskirts of a town in northern France, although Tara often travels to book fairs here and there, as she has done – to one in Bordeaux – when her life changes. On her way home she stops in Paris to collect some books for clients. She checks in to a hotel on the evening of 17 November, keeps numerous appointments on the 18th, burns her hand while spending the evening with friends and calls Thomas from her room before going to sleep.
But the newspaper she picks up at breakfast the next day is dated the 18th. A simple mistake, she thinks, until someone in the dining room drops a slice of bread and hesitates over what to do with it, just as she watched him do the day before. She checks other newspapers at a kiosk; withdraws cash and studies the receipt; calls her husband, who doesn't remember the previous night's conversation. She still has the burn, but everything else she did on the 18th, including the purchasing of books, which she finds back on the shelves of the shops where she bought them, has been reset. For Tara, the 18th of November is happening again.
In fact On the Calculation of Volume begins on Tara's 121st 18 November, which enables her journal entries to recount her outlandish situation with a degree of calmness and clarity (these, as becomes clear, not being the same as acceptance or understanding). By this point she has returned home – while the date resets at some point in the night, physically she remains wherever she has travelled to – and is living secretly in the spare room of her house. She knows each of her husband's movements, when he will go out and return home, when he will make a noise that will mask her own, and so can inhabit the day like a ghost, keeping her journal and working on theories while remaining unseen and unheard.
Solvej Balle herself has been largely unseen and unheard since stunning literary Denmark with her 1993 story collection According to the Law. She downplays accounts of reclusiveness, protesting that all she did was leave Copenhagen. But On the Calculation of Volume nevertheless represents an extraordinary late-career success: the first five self-published books (with two to come) became a sensation in Denmark, the first three together winning the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize, and attracting publishers around the world. In the UK Faber & Faber has published the first two books simultaneously (translated by Barbara J Haveland), with the third following in November. The first has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
When we meet Tara she is keeping herself apart, but there was an earlier time when she would tell Thomas, every morning, what had happened to her, convincing him with her uncanny knowledge of the day ahead:
' I could tell him when the rain would stop and when it would start again, I could tell him that the postman would come by at 10.41 during a light shower, I could describe how soon after that a long-tailed titmouse would flit about the branches of the apple tree, and I could predict that at 5.14 in the afternoon, in the pouring rain, our neighbour would hurry past the fence at the bottom of our back garden, turn right and jog down the path between our house and his own.'
Together they discuss what has happened, formulate possible solutions, and carry out experiments. But as time goes on, or in Tara's case doesn't, she tires of having to explain things anew each day. She is also disappointed by Thomas's refusal to accompany her to Paris, thinking the door leading out of this loop in time must be located where she entered it.
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The first two books of Balle's project achieve a compelling balance of action and thought. Tara thinks a lot but also does while she thinks. As well as being good at this, Balle is also preternaturally gifted at answering questions just as they start to form in a reader's mind. The first that occurs concerns how Tara got from Paris to Clairon-sous-Bois (those indoctrinated by the Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day might expect her to return to the same place each time she wakes). She cannot move in time, but she can move in space. This opens fields of possibility. One of the dominant episodes in the second book involves a scheme to manufacture a year by travelling to different latitudes: following a chance meeting with a meteorologist she travels to Sweden and Norway for winter, Cornwall for spring, southern Spain for summer. If there's a kind of madness to the idea, it's a madness that helps keep her sane. As for all these different climates coexisting on a single autumn day, it's a great advert for the Schengen Area.
Another involving subplot concerns what Tara can hang on to versus what disappears when time resets. Through experiment she learns the rules are knowable but not immutable:
'We bought things and left them lying in the kitchen. We opened them or left them unopened. We observed and we kept notes. Usually, the items that we hadn't opened disappeared during the night and went back to where we had bought them. We took things up to the bedroom with us at night, I bought a jar of olives and placed it on the windowsill, I put a toothbrush, unopened and still in its box, under my pillow. The following morning the toothbrush was still there, box and all, but the jar of olives was gone and a packet of tea which Thomas had put in a kitchen cabinet had also vanished.'
Tara adapts her behaviours as she becomes more familiar with what is and isn't possible. If she wants to keep a new dress she must wear it immediately, with nothing underneath, to 'train' it to stay with her. She also learns that the food she consumes stays consumed. If she goes to a café and orders the same dish several days in a row, eventually that dish disappears from the menu. She finds this fact deeply disturbing. It makes her 'a monster in a finite world'.
One of the most impressive things about Balle's project is the care she has taken in thinking about Tara's predicament both practically and philosophically, and the sedulousness with which she explores it. The book Thomas is (repeatedly) reading in Clairon-sous-Bois is called Lucid Investigations, the title of which works for Balle's novel, too: even when the logic becomes head-spinning, the prose maintains its methodical, elegant pace. And while individuals might differ from Tara in their priorities (I imagine some would consider a fling earlier than day 578), her situation says something universal and profound about loneliness and depression, as well as the monotony that characterises certain stretches of our lives.
By the close of book two, three years have passed and Tara is in Düsseldorf, where she seems to have a pretty nice time. She squats in an old architect's studio, spends days reading in cafés, watches a local football team win promotion (actually impossible in Germany in November) and attends university lectures. She knows she is privileged, 'that my cage is gilded', but on the final page its bars are rattled: the next 18 November, it seems, will be very different from the last.
On the Calculation of Volume
Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland
Faber & Faber, 192pp, £12.99
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[See also: The second birth of JMW Turner]
Related
This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall