After 10 Years, She’s Still Waking Up on the Same Day

ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME: Book IV, by Solvej Balle

Sometimes you seize the day. Sometimes the day seizes you.

At least that’s what seems to have happened to Tara Stelter, the protagonist of “On the Calculation of Volume,” the Danish writer Solvej Balle’s seven-volume, category-destroying mega-novel. By the end of Book IV, the most recent to appear in English (in a lucid translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell), Tara has lived through the same calendar day 3,637 times — nearly 10 years’ worth of Nov. 18s.

A lot has happened in that time, even if time itself has stood still. Is that the right phrase? How to refer to this mysterious temporal jam is one of the urgent issues in the new book. Is it “a loop, a lap, or simply a repetition”? A “cycle or a circle” or “the retake and remake of the day”?

With three volumes to go, there’s always hope of figuring it out. And there are other reasons to keep going, whether or not Tara or the reader ever discovers why or how this looping happened in the first place. Balle has so far been disinclined to provide any hints, and Tara is too caught up in the practical details and phenomenological nuances of the experience to think much about its cause.

She’s also been busy. While Tara’s first-person chronicle of her predicament doesn’t exactly have a plot, there are enough twists, kinks and cliffhangers in and between the novels to justify a spoiler alert if you haven’t read them. And you definitely should! This is a strange, absorbing, subversively funny literary performance, a deadpan satire of life in a borderless, complacent Europe and an allegory of civilizational stuckness.

Balle, who lives privately on a small island in southern Denmark, is our century’s answer to Proust. I don’t mind waiting until you catch up. What is time, anyway?

That’s the large philosophical question that hangs over Balle’s project, which has claimed three decades of her life. (The fifth volume will be published in America later this year). For her part, Tara, an antique book dealer who lived pre-Nov. 18 in a small city in northern France, often seems most comfortable describing her experience in abstract terms. “It is hard to know when something ends and where something begins,” she muses at the beginning of Book IV. “Or someone. Where a person starts or stops.”

There are quite a few more people in this book than in its predecessors. Back in Book I, Tara seems alone in her loop, which starts in the Paris hotel where she stopped on the way home from a business trip to Bordeaux.

After a few iterations of Nov. 18 (each chapter starts with number indicating how many have gone by), she returns home to her husband, Thomas, who is living through time in its usual sequence. She gets him to understand what has happened to her, but of course she has to explain it all over again every morning. After a while she withdraws to a guest room, living as a ghost in her own house.

Subsequently — simultaneously? alternatively? in the next volume at any rate — she sets off on a meandering tour of Europe, visiting her out-of-the-loop parents in Belgium and then taking advantage of the continent’s geography to make it feel as if the seasons are changing. In Norway, mid-November is already winter; near the Mediterranean, you could mistake it for summer.

Eventually — on later versions of that same day — she alights in Düsseldorf, where she meets the first in a series of fellow time travelers, though I guess technically they’re the opposite of time travelers, which is what the rest of us must be. He is an American academic named Henry Dale, and his arrival in the first sentence of Book III signals a subtle shift in emphasis.

Before Tara meets him, we are beguiled by her solitary discovery of what it might feel like to undergo such a chronological disruption. With Henry on the scene we, like Tara, find ourselves facing a trickier question: What does it mean when this new way of living in time is shared? How do two people go through it together?

And what about more than two? Tara and Henry, who don’t always get along perfectly, are companions in loneliness, and sometimes intellectual sparring partners. (“We go for walks through the city, we argue, we cook together.”) But then they are joined by Ralf Kern and Olga Periti, a younger and more restless pair of Novembrists, intent on wrestling with the ethical and political implications of their condition. What are their obligations to one another, and to those who still dwell in the regular, linear flow of days?

It is Ralf and Olga who come up with a plan to locate more repeaters, putting up flyers in various Northern European cities that only members of this accidental tribe would understand. With Henry and Tara, they move into a big, empty house in Bremen.

And now in Book IV, with a nod to James Joyce (another novelistic time-geek): Here comes everybody. On Day #1892, there are nine people in the house. More trickle in until, on #2246, there are “29 of us around the table,” with as many as 50 spread across the continent. By #2633 (a little more than a year later) the house “has become a reception center, a gathering place, a meeting point.”

There are a lot of meetings! Once again Balle’s emphasis quietly and unmistakably shifts, this time toward questions of social organization. Some of these are practical — how do you manage the comings and goings, the basic needs and desires of such a big group? — but at least as much attention is devoted to matters of language.

Since the usual nomenclature of weeks, months and years don’t apply, some propose a Latinate vocabulary of centia, millia, decims and pentans. Others argue over the metaphors to capture their reality. Is time for them like “string of beads” or “a washing line filled with clothespins”; “a tunnel” or a “long stagger from pub to pub”? A fellow named Lenk Hamon objects that “metaphors are not what we need.”

The new book contains a lot of concrete information: As the ranks of the repeaters have swelled, the reservoir of knowledge about their condition has deepened. Readers will already know that while money withdrawn from an A.T.M. on one Nov. 18 will be replenished by the next, the same won’t happened to groceries bought at the market or plants pulled from the earth. The repeaters are also depleters, and “On the Calculation of Volume” is partly an ecological parable.

But not — not yet! — a dystopian vision. A plausible American version of this story would surely feature fistfights and shootouts, with rival factions of 18ers squaring off about what they should be called and who should be in charge. (The actual American version, Harold Ramis’s 1993 film “Groundhog Day,” is a parable of individual self-improvement.)

Balle’s eternal present is a notably calm, conflict-free place of communal meals and earnest deliberation. There are differences of temperament and taste but no dangerous divisions. Someone notices that the people passing through the Bremen house represent “a fairly homogeneous segment of the population” — multilingual, educated, mostly childless, neither rich nor poor. “People with loose-fitting identities and unsettled lives.”

Have they seceded from the world or been cast out of it? Is this gentle, melancholy project best read as a protest, a warning or a comforting fairy tale? It may be too soon to say.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023.

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