On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle

The time loop of our lives

The opening paragraph of On the Calculation of Volume, the first two parts of which are recently translated from the Danish, is full of the boringly familiar type of description that we are used to from Cusk, Knausgaard, Fosse, Ernaux, and others. Elizabeth Bowen complained about Virginia Woolf’s pointless attention to the minute. The complaint echoes in my mind every time I try to read one of the modern (and often—but not always—auto-fiction) novels that makes a high art of minutiae and seemingly little else.

But Solvej Balle is better than that. The opening line, There is someone in the house, is not, as we might expect, the disembodied pronouncement of a narrator who alights unceasingly on the mundane. No: this is not the now overfamiliar and pointless use of the “expletive subject.” As the subsequent paragraphs make clear, this is the voice of someone who is trapped.

Only, once again, what we expect is undermined. The narrator seems to be staying away from Thomas, the man moving around the house, keeping herself purposively out of sight even of people passing in the street. But then, on the third page, another broadening revelation:

It is the eighteenth of November. Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November. I no longer expect to wake up on the nineteenth of November and I no longer remember the seventeenth of November as if it were yesterday.

At last, a major modern international novel that is not the very model of the exhausted experiment of modernism’s inheritors, but, instead, a novel of character and mystery. I no longer need to keep trying to read the exhaustively dull My Struggle. Here is a real story instead.

The opening line, There is someone in the house, is a keynote. Indeed, there is someone in the house. And the chapter title #121 becomes clear: it is a reference to this being the one hundred and twenty first repetition of the eighteenth of November. This is, from the start, a strange novel, a Piranesi-like strangeness, realism inflected with fantasy, so that the mundane, that constant curse of modern fiction, becomes uncanny and unusual: “I keep track of the days. I keep track of the sounds in the house.”

In this way, cliches of stories about mid-marriage couples — seeing their names, familiar and unfamiliar at once, on a label; phrases like “time has come between us” — are once again alive with ambivalent meanings. At this stage, a story about a woman avoiding her husband, told in plain language that is close to the details of the day, is a tiresome exercise in repetition; in Balle’s time-twisting setting, however, it is a fascinating new departure.

Hilary Leichter said in the New York Times that On the Calculation of Volume has reimagined the time-loop narrative. On the Calculation of Volume has also reimagined the modern novel as a Romance. It is written in a diary format, some paragraph-long entries, some multiple pages, which allows Balle to make a realistic narrator depict her strange and unusual world without over explaining everything. It does not read like a fantasy novel, and that is not what most people will call it, but whether you say quest narrative, or Romance, or fantasy, that is what it is. In this way, it has avoided the great limitation of so much modern fiction, which is that it in depicting the mundane it has too often become mundane. On the Calculation of Volume innovates in both genres. (Balle self-published On the Calculation of Volume, with her own imprint, to maintain full control. The Danish press noted that it is remarkable for a self-published book to win a major literary prize, which Balle did.)

All novels are novels of ideas. One of the ideas Balle works through is the way we become trapped in our times, in the days of our lives and in the hours of our days. We live, always, in the margins of time, which is constantly advancing and receding, as if we were trapped on a rock between two tides, one flowing in, and the other roaring away. What is the real centre of our lives? Is it now, as we work, or was it yesterday, as we smiled in the cafe with our children? When are we making the most of our time? In the endless careful ways in which we get done what must be done or in the moments of happy relief from cares? The thought experiment of On the Calculation of Volume asks: what would happen to a person, morally, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, who was trapped in a time loop? Where is the time of our lives?

At first, Tara and her husband find the odd situation invigorating. She remembers; he does not. Every day, she has to explain to him why she is there (she had been on a work trip). Despite the almost inconceivable oddity of what is happening, it becomes familiar.

I don’t know if we can be said to have looked for an explanation. We circled. We had no shortage of suggestions, ideas, or odd flights of fancy. We went around in a cloud of theories, observations and interpretations… We found patterns but didn’t investigate them more closely. We found inconsistencies; we wondered about them and then forgot them.

But this cannot be shared, not really, because every day, when they wake up, she remembers and he does not. Eventually, of course, it becomes an impediment to living. Soon she stops telling him. It is too much. She lives in the spare room, keeping herself hidden, as we find her at the start. And then she goes on a journey. On the Calculation of Volume is a quest narrative, in which the heroine, Tara, is trying to find her way out of a time trap.

In the second volume, she goes to find winter. Stuck in perpetual autumn, she travels north. As is the nature of a quest, she meets someone who can give her the information she needs: a meteorologist, who tells her where she can find snow in November. “I no longer believe that I will suddenly wake up to a time that has returned to normal. But I believe in seasons.”

As the story moved on, I became preoccupied with the question of money. The objects that vanish or revert overnight are inconstant. Some of the things Tara acquires remain with her, some do not. Anything she takes and eats is no longer there the next day. So she has to begin shopping somewhere else. (The fact that the bread is all gone and the vegetables are vanished doesn’t seem to make any impression on the shop keeper.)

As Tara travels, she needs money, and takes out a lot of cash on her credit card. Digital data seems to reset, whereas physical items vanish. But why, if the food she eats is no longer there, is the money she spends not a problem? Laptops cannot retain data, but her notes still exist on paper. What accounts for this difference? Doesn’t she wake up at her credit limit one day? Doesn’t the card service notice that there are multiple charges in multiple places on the same day? Surely the standard security checks would kick in? At some point, the integrity of this world-building collapses. The money we spend digitally is just as “gone” as the food we eat.

Perhaps this is all to be explained later on. These are only the first two volumes of a seven volume series. This inconsistency didn’t stop me enjoying the novels, but Balle is taking up grand themes—identity, climate change, the nature of the self, marriage—and those can only be well handled with proper coherence. The major theme of Volume II is the sense of stagnation in an old and faltering civilization. Her discussion of the Roman empire is excellent. For that, the time-loop conceit works marvellously.

Elizabeth Bowen came into my mind in another way as I read Balle. I remembered a line from A World of Love that has aways stayed with me. (That, too, is a novel of time loops, in its own way.) “Impossible is it for persons to be changed when the days they have still to live stay so much the same.”

Volume II ends on a cliff-hanger. I will not spoil it for you. But I can tell you that if the other volumes had been translated, I would, right now, be going out to buy them and read them today.