Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Volume (Faber & Faber, 2024) ****

The great thing about this novel is that it's very original and memorable. The main character, Tara Selter is caught in a kind of time warp, endlessly imprisoned in the 18th of November. As time progresses, she always returns to the same day, forever. How this could have happened is unclear, and whether there's a way out, is equally unclear. Because she has already lived through the same day so often when the book begins - 122 times - she can generally predict what will happen, when it will rain, when the neighbour will walk the dog, what her husband Thomas will say. Luckily she has some freedom of movement and freedom of choice so that she can move through this day with some slight alterations. 

Of course she can discuss this with her husband, but the next day, he will have completely forgotten about it, starting anew on the same day. Sometimes she gets through to him, when showing evidence of her incredible predicament: 

"And then it kicks in: the emergency response, and could tell, as I sat there in my hotel room, still dazed by having wit­nessed the repeated fall of a slice of bread, that that was what had happened to Thomas. I could tell by his voice. The quiet panic when he realised what had happened and his falter­ing attempts to come up with a reasonable explanation. It wasn't a problem with the line. It was the ground under his feet falling away, his emergency response being triggered, his first-aid box being unpacked. The door opening onto a world in which everything can be subject to change. A time falling apart, a day repeating itself, experiences disappearing from memory without a trace, dust returning to places from which one knows it had been wiped away." (p. 36)

 It is clear that the absurdity of her situation quickly touches the borders of rationality, because many aspects of her life become totally contradictory and impossible. But that's part of the novel's charm: it puts us in a situation where we ourselves start thinking more deeply about time and what it actually represents. Things we have always taken for granted appear to be less so. Not that it's a lesson in physics, but it raises deep questions. 

"Actually, though, we had no shortage of explanations, we had plenty of those, but explanations which could stand up to critical scrutiny and at the same time embody all our many observations, those we could not find. All our lines of enquiry came to dead ends, we explored each strand thoroughly and returned empty-handed every time. There were flaws and a lack of coherence, there were facts that didn't fit, there were contradictions and paradoxes. Every system fell apart the minute we tried to put all our data together to form a whole. There was no consistency, we could not get the facts of the day to square with certain of our theories, we could not construct coherent systems or find any pattern, and all our detailed explanations had to be rejected one after the other. Every time we came to a dead end we had to go back to the facts: Thomas was subject to the laws of forgetfulness, and I was accumulating too many days in my memory. (p. 89)

The only challenge for Tara is that she gets older, instead of being renewed each morning. Her body is affected by time as can be expected in linear time: hair turning grey, skin starting to wrinkle, etc. Strangely enough, the question that I would have raised does not seem to enter her mind: is there another Tara whose life continues after November 18? Is this cyclical day just an anomaly for one part of her that gets trapped when another part just moves on? Is there even a day as November 19 for everyone else, or has time stopped on this day for everyone? Maybe these questions will get answered in the next six volumes of this story. 

Balle writes well, and despite the dozens and dozens of repetitive days that she describes, the text is well-balanced, with new little facts making the text interesting and captivating at the same time. I'm not sure whether I will read the full septology, but the first book was very enjoyable.