On the Incomplete Calculation of Volume

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Well, nuts. I started in on these books before realizing that the translations of the final three volumes haven’t been published yet (indeed, I believe the last is still to be published in Danish). Now, after gobbling up the first four volumes, I have to settle in for a long wait before the rest show up. Although the volumes are published separately, they feel very much like parts of a single book, and I like to read single books all the way through. I’m not alone. There’s a low rumble on the internet of other people waiting—see this NYT profile for some impatient noises from other readers.

If you haven’t gotten to it yet, and you hate spoilers, then this is your warning to look away. I want to discuss the way the first four books unfold without worrying about ruining it for anyone.

The premise is simple. Tara Selter is an antiquarian book dealer in her late 20s who lives with her husband Thomas in a village in France. While on a business trip she goes to sleep on November 18th and wakes up the next morning to discover that it is November 18th again. The next day is also November 18th, and so on. The weather is the same, everyone else takes the same route through their day, day after day. The story of this strange unfolding of unchanging days, and the woman who moves through them changing, is told entirely through the entries of Tara’s journal.

It’s like the movie Groundhog Day! Well, superficially, yes. But the rules of the uncanny looping world that Balle creates are different in ways that matter. Tara moves and changes and ages while everyone and (almost) everything else endlessly resets. If she travels to another city, she wakes in the new city the next day, not returned to the bed where she first woke on the first November 18th. If she sprains her ankle, it is not healed overnight, but rather heals slowly over a series of November 18ths. She ages, her hair grows and needs to be cut, and so on. It is everyone else who resets daily and runs on the same track, while she moves freely around them.

Here are some of the rules: If Tara returns to a shop to buy food for several days in a row, the supply of what she’s bought in the shop begins to run down. Most things reset every day (such as her bank balance and credit limit, essentially freeing her from financial worry), but she realizes fairly quickly that other things are not replenished, that she is slowly using up the world.

The rules for object persistence are lawlike but only loosely: It’s pointless for her to write a document on a computer because the next November 18th the hard (or cloud) drive will be returned to its original state. Objects purchased on one November 18th may well be gone when she wakes up on the following one.

But not all objects disappear in this way, especially if she sleeps with them close to her. Then they may fall out of the general resetting tendency of things into her own time and so persist across November 18ths. This is how her diary and her new clothes and a few other possessions acquire their cross-November-18th persistence. Sometimes it takes several days of close contact with an object to make this stick. But this trick of bringing an object into her looping time and out of endless resetting only works for things, not people, who reset each day no matter how close she is to them.

This is only a sketch of the peculiar world Balle has constructed. Practically every page is a meditation on its strange qualities, which she has imagined with depth and rigour.

But for all the work Balle puts into the details they don’t make enough sense for her story to qualify as a sort of hard sci-fi, where only a single parameter in the nature of things is tweaked so we can see the difference the change might make.

For example, the day resets at some point during the night. But a day, or a night, is a human measure of time, difficult to connect to general physical laws of the universe. Why would the universe—presumably it is November 18th again on Jupiter too and all the way over in M87¹ and so on—suddenly begin to carve up time in chunks of exactly an earth day? The story eventually spans many time zones. But America’s night is not Europe’s night. If the day resets at some specific time in Europe’s night then the reset cannot really fall at that point in America’s night. If at a different time, then what does internet traffic look like as one end of November 18th communicates with an entirely different November 18th?

Balle has all these sorts of complications covered only in the sense that she stresses repeatedly (through Tara’s reflections) how little sense any of it makes. But saying that things make no sense is an apology for incoherence, not a finishing touch that makes the whole thing fit together consistently.

For this reason I prefer to think of the story with all its rules as something more like fantasy than hard sci-fi, and the payoff is in the psychological exploration it permits the author, not in shedding light on the more ‘realistic’ (that is, closer to our reality) aspects of the philosophy of time. In the end, I think this is the logic of a dream, not the logic of a philosophy paper.²

What would you do, caught in a temporal loop in this way?³ What Tara soon does is return from her business trip to her husband, Thomas. She explains and—this is the main thing that feels psychologically false in Balle’s story, the relative lack of difficulty she has explaining to people that she is trapped inside a single day, when in fact this is absurd and unbelievable—he listens and believes. They pass the day together in discussion, trying to figure out what to do. But the next day she wakes beside him and must explain herself all over again—and then again the following November 18th. She grows and learns and reflects and changes as she moves through the November 18ths but Thomas is stuck resetting, and they cannot help drifting away from the intimacy that defined their relationship on the first of these repeating November 18ths. And so Tara cannot stop a profound loneliness from creeping over her life.

Knowing his entire routine, that he never enters their spare bedroom on November 18th, that he takes the same path through the house every day, and wearying of daily explanations, Tara moves quietly into the spare bedroom. Thomas is not worried by her absence because on November 17th she had departed for a business trip. She knows when he will leave on an errand, when he will return, after being caught in the same rain, and so she is able to haunt the house like a ghost, undetected.

After some time like this she begins to yearn for the changing of the seasons. So she begins to move north within Europe slowly in search of snow when it ‘should’ be deep winter, and then moves south again in search of spring and summer. She visits family with Christmas presents on the November 18th that should be Christmas, and so on.

And then one November 18th Tara discovers that she is not alone. She meets another person who is also tangled up in November 18th the way she is. This gives Balle another chance to explore a different set of responses to the peculiar break in time she’s engineered. And then the two of them encounter others, and then still others, who are similarly stuck, eventually forming a little society of outcasts, drawn together by their strangeness and the exhilarating fact that they’ve found others with whom they can move forward in time, at least in the sense that they can all carry memories from one November 18th to another.

The story, at least in the first four books, unfolds without much outward drama. It’s a place with financial security, a zombie story in which the zombies are predictable and mostly harmless and non-contagious. There’s a great deal of freedom so long as you’re careful and you have a credit card which resets every day and never needs to be paid off.

Of course, there are a few things to watch out for. You’re hardly safe from accidents, for one thing. And what would happen if a serious accident took you to the hospital for an overnight stay? Would you wake the next morning after a reset in a bed already taken by another patient? What would happen if you checked into a hotel room on the afternoon of November 18th that someone else has occupied on the morning of November 18th? Care must be taken to ensure the room started the day empty so that you don’t need to explain to a stranger how you got into their bed. And if you did find yourself in such a situation and the police scooped you up into prison while they tried to sort things out, how would you ever get out of that, needing to explain each morning how you wound up in a cell with no record of your getting there (I started worrying about this in Volume I but no character mentioned this risk until Volume IV)? If your passport begins to move with you through time (instead of uselessly being returned every morning to where it always was on November 18th) then it also begins to age and crease. And even if you are very careful with it, as you begin to age and wrinkle, the photo in it looks less and less like you—and how could you have it replaced in the course of a single day?

Although these complications and worries add interest to the story, as I said, the Europe that our growing cast of characters moves through is pretty safe and free of drama. Indeed, one mystery we are left with at the close of the fourth volume is why the backgrounds (class, age, membership in the EU) of the characters are so similar. This may explain why none of them has turned this looping world into place in which they can exercise cruelty or criminality.

In any case, one thing that makes the books remarkable is that Balle tells a story without much external drama and in such detail while holding our attention so well. The logistics of life, leisure, and loss, along with the psychological distortions produced, are her continual, and fascinating, focus.

Within this dream logic, we are allowed to explore what it means to love someone who is unable to lay down new memories. It is the experience of loving a spouse with dementia, except broadened to the whole world. We explore the alienation that comes with radically different experiences from the people around us, with no convincing way of communicating what we know. And then when Tara meets others caught up in her formerly solitary predicament, we see how sharing that non-standard experience makes connections between people who might not otherwise have connected.

And how should Tara regard ordinary people, the ones who reset? She loves Thomas, of course. She and the other characters clearly take ordinary people to be subjects of moral concern. From the inside, although they follow the same course every day, they take themselves to be acting freely. But I couldn’t help starting to think of them as automata in some way, and of Tara and her small group of friends as the only ones left with free will, the only humans left. Or is it, as Tara and her friends wonder at one point, that they themselves are no longer human. In any case, the experiences of the two groups are so profoundly different that they drift apart from everyone else as surely as Tara does from Thomas.

The fourth volume ends with a mystery that makes waiting for the fifth especially difficult: Thomas contacts Tara, having somehow broken free from the track on which he’s run every other November 18th and discovered her notes and things in the spare bedroom, the one he has never checked on any other November 18th. As the fourth volume ends, she is on her way back to him.

So that’s where we are, at roughly the midway point through the septology, and I will certainly pick the story back up when the next volumes are available.

Up to this point, I’ve left out my reservations. Perhaps the main one is that at times the characters other than Tara are drawn a little woodenly. I could never get a good feel for Thomas, for why Tara loves or misses him. There is something so muted in his presence that I did not feel there was anything especially wrenching about Tara’s decision to leave him and begin her exploration, eventually settling in another city.⁴ True, Tara’s journal only starts 121 days into her catastrophe, after the point that she’s started to haunt Thomas like a ghost, and the story of how she got to that point is told looking back. So we begin the story after their intimacy has ruptured rather than before it, which may colour how he’s depicted. And perhaps she is free to leave him because she knows she can return any time and find him unchanged. Perhaps there is a deeper point about the conditions required to sustain intimacy, however genuine. So the flatness here might be literary effect. But I’m not sure. It seems to me more like a flaw in the work, and that Balle simply did not succeed in breathing enough life into their relationship for me to experience Tara’s decision to leave as wrenching. There is a sort of woodenness in most of the other characters too. Although the books are beautifully written and Balle’s theme developed with great ingenuity, perhaps this prevents the books from being truly great or lasting.