On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle

The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a November. The nineteenth never appears. On the 121st iteration of the same day she begins to write by describing the sounds made by her husband Thomas as he moves around upstairs. The same moves, the same noises every day. A simple premise and very promising, but very difficult to turn into a compelling narrative. If everything she sees and hears is going to be the same from one day to the next, variation or resolution can only undermine the conceit, making the novel the diary of an anecdote, essentially a ghost story,¹ but if there is no variation or resolution, boredom and impatience are inevitable. And the novel is indeed fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, as the premise gives the reader an existential thrill imagining what such a condition might entail while also wondering how the constraint on the story will develop, and perhaps even resolve, but frustrating because there are only so many meditations on a regular day one can read.

The novel is filled out with Tara's precise observations of her surroundings and descriptions of the events leading up to the "rift in time", a level-headed attention suggested by the title, all of which may be interesting in context, but not otherwise. However, any longueurs are mitigated when, longing for a world in which time passes, she tries to reach the nineteenth. She interrupts Thomas' routine and explains the situation in the hope that he will be able to lead her into the next day, but by morning he has to be told all over again. However, this does have its unique joys:

We woke in the morning, we went for walks, we sat down and had coffee somewhere on the eighteenth of November. For most of the day as intimately aware of one another as couples in the first flush of love or nearsighted creatures. We made the horizon vanish. We sought this giddy feeling. The distance between us was dispelled in the fog. We made the giddiness a part of our day. Created a bright space out of dazed, gray confusion.

The reader nevertheless is impatient for a resolution and spins the hands of the clock forward enabled by the smooth translation of Balle's uncluttered prose, only to discover on closing the book that there is a serenity in the stability of Tara's infinite crisis, and now that serenity is gone. This may be why there are several more volumes ahead, just as there is always another day ahead.

Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland

Part one of On the Calculation of Volume has been reviewed widely and made the International Booker Prize shortlist and came top of the Shadow Panel's vote.² While many of the reviews place the novel within a generic tradition and cite one of the most famous novels about time as a literary predecessor, not one review that I've found recognises the significance of the apparently random date chosen for Tara to explore. Had they wondered why a Danish author chose to write a multi-volume novel about time from the perspective of a French woman, they may have discovered that the eighteenth of November is the day in 1922 on which the author of À la recherche du temps perdu died.³ There are other parallels, albeit travelling in the opposite direction: Tara's experience at the beginning of the rift is a neat inversion of Proust's narrator at the beginning of that novel: each morning he wakes in uncertainty to reconstruct reality from forgetful sleep, while she wakes to a sense of peace as the normality of another morning appears, only for its normality to dissolve. And when she tells Thomas everything and they stay awake all night hoping the nineteenth will appear in an entirely new dawn, a sudden imperceptible loss of concentration leads to him losing the memory of the day, a moment that reverses Proust's famous instants.

Perhaps then this is a novel written from the end of time, from the blank space of death or, less morbidly, from eternity. For Nietzsche, eternity is precisely the revelation of time. This is Tara's revelation. In the face of relentless change, the serene stability of the novel is the ideal form to enable an experience of time in relation to the horizon of eternity. This may explain why the rise of the novel coincided with the decline of faith and the disenchantment of the world. If poetry is the gift of eternity and the novel the gift of time, the novels of Proust and Solvej Balle seek to merge both in the flow of imagination and reality.⁴

 

 

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1. David Lowery's movie A Ghost Story springs to mind here. A dead husband haunts the house he shared with his wife and watches from afar.↩

2. See the Booker Prize website and the Shadow Panel's Substack report. The latter tends to more reliable in purely literary terms as it's not driven by corporate demands.↩

3. A letter to the TLS mentions it in response to a review, but most is behind the paywall so I can't credit the correspondent for also being a clever clogs.↩

4. There is another connection, not film or book related. In the thinking of the experience of the same day and the fog obscuring the movement from one day to the next, I remembered seeing J Mascis and the Fog perform the song Sameday live in Brighton many years ago. The Fog that night featured Mike Watt of Minutemen (and later the underrated fIREHOSE) and Ron Asheton of The Stooges.

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