There was a night as a boy when I couldn’t sleep ahead of a football match, too wired by thoughts of the sporting heroics I might achieve—or fall short of—the next day. While tossing and turning in my bed, I began thinking about my teammates already asleep in theirs. And if we experience sleep as a mere passing blip—as soon as we enter its tunnel, we are seemingly shot out the other side—could it be that they were in fact already waking up to tomorrow while I was still stuck in today? Were they already feeling the static from their long, red football socks, flattening their pillow-ruffled hair with water from the bathroom sink, and shoving soggy cereal in their mouths? Could it be that we were existing in two different temporal dimensions, entirely out of sync?
In Solvej Balle’s near-addictive septology On the Calculation of Volume—the first three volumes of which have been published in English over the past year, with the fourth due in April—a version of my childhood thought experiment is taken to delightful, delirious ends. Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller living in the fictional town of Clairon-sous-Bois in northern France, is reliving 18th November again and again, while everyone else—her partner Thomas, friends Marie and Philip—lives it as though for the first time. We know this because Tara is writing a diary—at the start of book one, she has lived 121 iterations of the same day; by the end of book three, 1,892 have passed, and we aren’t even halfway. “There is too much November in the air,” she writes, with characteristic calmness, echoing that mournful lyric by Czesław Miłosz, “There is too much world.”
Over the course of the first three books—six have already been released in Denmark, and Balle is at work on the seventh—Tara describes her 18th Novembers in conversational prose whose outward lightness conceals a hidden density; Deborah Levy would be a good Anglophone comparison. She flits with ease between the high and the low. A paragraph beginning, “I had heated up the potatoes in the oven,” soon morphs into a discussion of the “demarcation line” between the two time zones in which she now finds herself; shifts captured in smooth translations by Barbara J Haveland (books one and two) and Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (book three). There is a magnetic monotony to her prose and it feels remarkably intimate, not only because of the diary form but because Tara is, for now, alone in this looping universe; we are the only people who are, in some way, there with her, who get it.
Many of Tara’s entries are dedicated to trying to decipher the intricate logic of her new existence. Though time has glitched, it still leaves fingerprints of its passing: her hair and nails grow; a burn on her hand heals; an ankle injury swells up and down; some purchases stay while others vanish; chocolate turns grey. But there are cracks and inconsistencies—what belongs in her world versus her former world is hard to grasp. After making eggs with Thomas one day, two are missing from the carton but the shells are no longer in the bin. How to make sense of this paradox?
Tara seems more curious about her situation than disturbed by it, and this is her strength as a narrator—she settles in to the unsettledness, she “plucks” at the world around her, she puts names to inexplicable phenomena, almost taking pleasure in this “zone of indecisiveness”. There are no opportunistic attempts to play the lottery or have affairs with her new unsolicited superpower. She is enquiring, observant, meaning-seeking, as if she can finally look into how things work, now that everything has stopped working.
While time loops in art are nothing new, neither are they all that common. I immediately think of Bill Murray being repeatedly slapped in the 1993 film Groundhog Day as the form’s trademark, though there are earlier examples: Philip K Dick’s 1964 sci-fi novel Martian Time-Slip and Richard A Lupoff’s 1973 short story “12:01 PM”. Nietzsche, never far from a philosophical hoo-ha, wrote about “Eternal Return” in his 1882 book The Gay Science. But Balle maintains in interviews that her inspiration was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes place on 16th June 1904, and that the idea came to her in 1987, six years prior to the Hollywood version.
Before On the Calculation of Volume, only Balle’s short story collection According to the Law had been translated into English. In 2006, weary with the bestseller-obsessed publishing world of Copenhagen, she moved to Ærø, a small island of about 6,000 inhabitants. It is here, ironically, and not her country’s capital, where she found commercial success with On the Calculation of Volume: the first three volumes earned her the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize, while volume one was shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize in 2025. Septologies, however, are a crowded market in the Nordics; in neighbouring Norway, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, while Jon Fosse—another septologist—won the Nobel prize for literature in 2023. Though Balle is well known in Denmark’s literary circles, Danish friends tell me she is not a household name—and, it seems, has little desire to be.
Balle’s prose, however, is relatable and readable even with its heady, conceptual core. On the Calculation of Volume does not take place in abstraction: its location is rainy northern France, not some planet in outer space; its protagonist a bookseller who deals in dusty, old encyclopaedias, not some mad scientist experimenting with time. And by tinkering with the laws of reality, Balle somehow brings us closer to it.
“We behave as if nothing has happened,” Tara writes, “take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is; improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.” She is not writing about her world here, but ours, the one she used to inhabit before she slipped through time. Suddenly our days, weeks, months, years seem like little human fictions, mere stories we wrap around ourselves to provide a semblance of coherence against an incoherent world. Reading the book, I found myself asking—yes, again and again—who is actually the one stuck here? Who is the one cut off from how things really are?
So how did this all happen, Tara keeps wondering, as do we. How did she fall through, into, out of time? She pores over events from the original 18th November—Paris, meetings, hotel, work trip—in the hope of finding an explanation. But nothing significant took place. Business as usual. On the morning of what should have been the 19th, she initially dismisses seeing yesterday’s newspapers at breakfast as no big deal. Perhaps today’s editions haven’t been delivered yet, she thinks. But it’s when she sees someone drop a slice of bread again, hesitate and swap it for a croissant that the nightmare of her situation dawns on her. She is suddenly like Major Kovalyov from Gogol’s “The Nose”, waking to discover his face is missing a rather central feature. Or like Gregor Samsa transforming into a giant insect in The Metamorphosis. She experiences a moment of truly Kafkaesque horror.
This moment of dislocation is the collection’s centre of energy, its big bang. Tara’s story then becomes a straightforward Odysseus-like tale of finding one’s way home. But how? What was straightforward is now totally bent out of shape. Tara can’t seem to find the secret door, the hidden code. She struggles to accept there is no neat, explanatory pattern; Beckett’s “You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that!” would fall on deaf ears. What Tara experiences is something like grief; she is suspended in a circular melancholia that won’t resolve into mourning.
Against this alienation, intimacy becomes a most precious currency. At first, Tara spends considerable time bringing Thomas into her world. Each morning, she has to explain the inexplicable. He understands. Then forgets the next day. She explains again. He understands, forgets. And so on. It is the book’s most moving sequence, the sadness of his forgetting sharpened by her remembering. But, Tara writes, “I remember those as the happiest days. Ever. I felt loved.”
Only by being so far apart can Tara and Thomas develop this closeness, Balle implies. It reminds me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s conception of how we get intimacy wrong—“a merging of two people is an impossibility”—and how to get it right: “once the realisation is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvellous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them.” This is the work’s great achievement (and why authors break the laws of reality in literature): to reveal our own world back to us in a way we couldn’t see before.
The subtext of On the Calculation of Volume—a work about being stuck—is freedom. What actually constitutes freedom? Does it have to mean the opposite of stuckness? It seems Balle’s answer to this is a resounding no. Though Tara can’t move through time, she moves freely through space. In book two, craving the shape of seasons, she stages the passing of a year by travelling to different parts of Europe: she finds winter snow in Scandinavia, spring lambs in Cornwall, summer heat in the south of France, autumnal winds in Germany. “If I want seasons,” she realises, “I will have to build them myself.” She makes new homes for herself, physically and intellectually. Her survival tool is reinvention—and it sparks motion.
She is also free to write, the very act of which is an enactment of freedom. “There may be healing in sentences,” writes Tara. Through her protagonist, Balle projects a vision of freedom that is hopeful; a way to find pockets of resistance against something beyond our control.
Don’t we all want to find our way home, be understood, discern the hidden mechanics that propel our life forward? By reducing the gap between Tara’s situation and our own, Balle gives the book a mirror-like lucidity. As Tara recounts with eagle-eyed detail the same vignettes she sees day after day—fans heading to a football match in Germany, Thomas tending to his vegetable patch—somehow she seems freer than us all; the only soul who is awake in a world of sleepwalkers. They are the ones who are stuck, not her.
“When I started out, I had the feeling that I was writing a love story,” said Balle in an interview. Reading that, I thought about Roland Barthes’s magnificent sentence: “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.” How do we keep on saying “I love you,” Barthes asks, without suffocating its meaning through repetition? This is precisely Tara’s challenge: to give the same day inflections that will be forever new, to transform repetition into renewal. And it’s one she takes on with grace. Love doesn’t offer a panacea, but understanding her predicament as an act, a marriage of the familiar and the new—just like love—might help.
This applies to Balle, the author, too. How can she sustain the energy across the seven books, and not just give Tara, but the reader, inflections of newness? At times, Balle’s diversions or digressions—when Tara’s bag is stolen, long meditations on the Romans, passages that describe observation after observation without much point—appear flat, arbitrary attempts to push the narrative forward. She also ends each volume with a minor cliffhanger; this feels unnecessary, a little defensive even, given there are so many other strengths to the works that would keep us reading. At the end of book three, however, there are hints that the story will take a more political turn, which would add a compelling new dimension.
So, what next? Will Tara find a way out? Will her nightmare resolve itself? Perhaps we, like Tara, should resist looking for the hidden code, the answer to the riddle. Tara’s line, “I cannot get out, but I can find ways in,” is a better guiding post; less resistance, more acceptance. And that seems important wisdom for us all, powerless as we are to the greater forces that orchestrate our life.TT
