On The Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle (“I want to escape this day, but there is no escaping.”)

“His name is Henry Dale, and I don’t need to tell him that time has ground to a halt. He already knows.” p. 3

I was surprised, upon opening Volume III of On The Caluclation of Volume, that Tara has met someone else who is stuck in the eighteenth of November. More and more, I am reading this book less as a piece of science fiction, or fantasy, and more as a work which is actually applicable to real life.

“I could never have imagined that I’d meet someone already walking around in my loop.” 

How many times have I thought that? Have I searched for someone else who “walks around in my loop” and therefore understands the experiences which have made me who I am? I can’t tell you how often I feel completely alone.

Tara’s thoughts, her experiences, often mirror my own. “Why am I here?” I think, and, “While I am here, surely I can do some good?”

“I lived in one November day. On repeat. I had tried to make time pass. But it stood still. The eighteenth of November was a container, or at least that’s how I saw it. I had tried to figure out why I was here. And to do as little damage as possible.”  p. 18

She is happy to have met Henry, who is a companion and not a lover, stumbling around in the loop of living the eighteenth of November ad nauseam. But, it isn’t without sacrifice.

“There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibility for their baggage.” p. 33

Henry looks at reliving the eighteenth of November with a different perspective than Tara’s.

“In many ways, the repetition of the 18th of November came as a relief. A day that made no assertions of progress and propulsion and promotion. At least the eighteenth of November is honest, he said. It wipes the slate clean.” p. 35

I would like a clean slate. I would like, as my third graders used to say, a “do over.” Have a chance to get things right, or at least better, than I have in my first attempt. It seems I am not alone, for at the end of the novel, two more people join Henry and Tara. Olga has come to Tara, at Henry’s advice, to have someone help her find Ralf. The two of them, Olga and Ralf, have an idea of seizing the opportunity to make this world a better place.

“She (Olga) didn’t want to return to standard time, as she called it, without having seized the chance to change the world. She saw the repetition as an opportunity. To see things more clearly. To get your fucking eyeballs polished, she said.” p. 130

Well, that’s certainly one way to look at one’s purpose in life. But, I am more inclined to side with Tara, who says, “I do not feel unhappy. I feel I am among friends. But I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I wouldn’t know what to say if anyone asked.” p. 157

How fascinating it is to look at these questions through the eyes of Solvej Balle, in her imaginative world presented in these slim volumes.

On The Calculation of Volume II by Solvej Balle “…I was never going to be able to escape from the eighteenth of November.”

…I go on writing, conscious that my loose sheets of paper may contain my last hope that this fault in time is only temporary, the hope that the next sheet will never be filled, because time will return to normal and there will be no more eighteenths of November to write about. (p. 65)

When I read On Calculation of Volume I, I couldn’t understand the parameters of Tara Selter’s new life. She wakes up to the eighteenth of November over and over and over again. Her husband is shocked when she comes home, much like Lucy’s siblings in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when Lucy comes back from the visiting Mr. Tumnus. “I’m here,” she shouted. “I’m here. I’ve come back. I’m all right.” But, time is a funny thing; in some ways it isn’t the same for everyone. 

“So,” I thought, “if Tara is living the same day on repeat, aren’t the people around her living the same day, too?” Now I see, with On The Calculation of Volume II, that there is a fault in time. And Tara is the only one who is aware of it. 

She constructs seasons for herself, with the help of a meteorologist she has met. She travels to different cities to meet the longing she has for different seasons. Stockholm in November is Winter. To encounter Spring she travels to London where the names of foods in her grocery cart will have to suffice: spring greens, spring onions and a plastic tub of spring soup. 

I left the shop clutching a little bagful of spring, not much, but enough for me to feel that I was in the right track. (p. 105)

Early Summer is found on a beach in Montpellier, where there is sun in the middle of the day. Tara has begun a seasons book, as she calls it, where she records the places she has visited and the temperatures there. (Later, when her bag containing this green, cloth covered notebook is stolen, I can’t help but think of the irony that the seasons themselves have been stolen from her.)

It occurs to Tara, in Düsseldorf, that she cannot make time change. She cannot make it speed up to where she wants it to be.

You can’t jump-start a year however closely you follow the meteorologists’ graphs and calculations and you can’t construct a year out of fragments of November. It cannot be done. I try not to think about years. It isn’t easy, but now I will think about days. (p. 139)

How much do the months, and days, govern our lives?  

What is time, anyway? 

Here there is only a neutral, gentle November day, because my time is not a circle, and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a pool, a vessel, a container. It is a backyard with a medlar tree and autumn sunshine. Coffee and sunshine on a day in November. Danke. (p. 146)

Maybe, what Balle is hinting at, is that time is now. The moment you are currently enjoying. The place where you are currently living. The life you are currently experiencing. I know it has done me little good to wish for what was, or to wonder what will be. That is no way to live, either. 

My search is no longer a hunger, it is not a longing or an urge. I frequent lecture halls and cafeterias, museums and libraries, and when the day is over I go back to my place. I let myself in and I know: I will never find the explanations I seek. I will only find new questions and new answers. (p. 183)

This is as appropriate an ending I can find to a book’s premise which encompasses time. Place. Connection. Meaning. What do we know? We can only find new questions and new answers, and, I think, accept the moment in which we dwell.

On The Calculation of Voume I by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J.Haveland (“Maybe there’s healing in sentences.”)

My husband, who is a gardener, notices things like this stone that is wrapped with a rope. In Japan, it has a name, sekimori ishi, and it indicates that a path is closed. Or, that visitors should take a different route.

I find it particularly meaningful in light of the way I placed such a stone in my blog. For a long time, it has been closed. Even now I am hesitant to move the boundary stone, uncertain if I’m ready to head down this blogging path again.

Yet, the requests to review books keep coming in, and more surprising than that, to me, is that my blog stats have not significantly changed since the post I last published. Perhaps there is still an interest in what can be found here…

Although I have not joined the International Booker Prize Shadow Jury this year, for the first time in at least eight years, I have been reading the list on my own. I was reluctant to read it under pressure as there is such little time between the announcement of long list and the winner. Instead, I wanted to take my time before submitting scores, and evaluating each book, with fellow shadow members so that we could arrive at a decision as to our winner. 

This year’s short list is not disappointing. I have read all but one, and I would like to share my thoughts on each as we draw closer to learning which book is the winner on May 20, 2025. Let’s begin with On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. 

The premise is relatively simple; the narrator relives the same day in her life over and over and over for a year. The end.

But, when thinking about it, I find much deeper applications. For example, couldn’t that scenario depict the way that we are stuck in our lives? We don’t know how we got somewhere, and we often don’t know how to escape. Certainly I have felt that I make the same mistakes, repeat the same routine, relive the same sorrows over and over and over.

Most poignant to me is when she speaks of writing, for it is a similar passion of mine:

I am sitting at a table with a pile of paper in front of me on which I have written that it is the 18th of November and that my name is Tara Selter. I feel as if I am no longer alone. As if someone is listening. My days have not been lost to oblivion. They exist. My days exist in my pile of paper, they have not been erased during the night, the paper remembers…Maybe there’s healing in sentences.” (p. 84)

Of course, this will probably not be an aspect of the book on which most readers focus. But, I am fascinated by the power of writing, the power of words, as a shelter in life’s storm. Can you relate?