On the Calculation of Volume, vol. III

“I have met someone who remembers.”

If you know, you know, as they say, and those of us who fell into the time-loop of the first two volumes of On the Calculation of Volume earlier this year knew that the third volume was coming on 18th November—the day on which, in the novel, the narrator-protagonist is stuck in a time-loop. It’s a nice touch to launch the new volume on the day when the book is set, but, alas, a Danish septology about a rare book dealer who finds herself living in a day which repeats over and over again isn’t going to have the same launch-day frisson as Harry Potter or Sally Rooney, and indeed there were no queues at the bookshops. My copy didn’t even arrive until the end of the 19th, so I woke up this morning and ignored all other responsibilities until I had read it.

Before I say anything else, let me say this: if you do not know these books, go and read them now. Don’t let me spoil it for you. But if you do know the first two volumes, then you know you will be hooked by the third volume’s opening sentence: “I have met someone who remembers.”

As is integral to the nature of the quest, the restless nature of human life is the driver of the plot. One assumes that Balle intends us to think of Stevens’s ‘The Poems of Our Climate’, as these lines fit the action and the tenor of the third volume so neatly.

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

“It is the eighteenth of November,” Tara says, “I have grown used to the thought, but I cannot grow used to the sounds. They are the sounds of what I have lost.” This drives her quest for happiness: she has searched, in volume II, for the seasons, traveling north for winter, to escape perpetual autumn; now she searches for some vestige of the past. Alas, it cannot work; she cannot fit back in with her husband.

In their search to make some meaning—some lasting meaning that can be perpetuated, since the imperfect is so hot in us—in the trapped days of their lives, the characters discover a new sense of mission as they discuss the possibilities of living the same day on repeat, while time is stuck for everyone else but not for them. How might they use their situation to acquire knowledge, prevent disaster, improve the world? The second volume was a tour of a declining civilization, a stagnant, complacent society: now we get the start of renewal, the awakened spirit of a band of misfits, all unable to move forward in time, all eager to find some way forward nonetheless.

Surprisingly, I could not help but think of the ending of Atlas Shrugged. The philosophy behind this story is completely different, of course: there is no sense in which Balle’s novel is meant to be Randian: quite the opposite: Rand’s insistence on the pure use of reason and a morally uncompromising individualism that lacks sufficient sympathy is absent from Balle, whose concern is aspirational human hubris. But once you are forced out of the normal flow of time, you are obliged to fall back on your own resources more and more: the characters who remember come together because the world cannot accommodate them. They are going to have to find a new way to live.¹ Rand wishes her characters to leave their mark on the world; Balle’s characters are the inverse: they worry about marking the world too much. This, however, may change in the next volume. Tara is almost anti-Randian, in her desire to vanish into the world. But she is nonetheless forced to make her own way, with people who share her disposition, her situation.

This is the heart of quest stories—, the discovery of a new way to accommodate yourself to the world, and the world to you. In this volume, Tara accepts, after a period of rueful confusion, that she cannot go back. She must pursue her own ends in this strange new world. Her quest has changed; she has new companions, the question of where to get food is important, they have a new mission.

So much that is familiar is put to new use by Balle. The time-loop, the non-affair, the quiet marriage, a sense of anxiety about the state of society, the gang of impassioned loners who want to save the world. These tropes are familiar from popular culture, literary fiction, Hollywood movies… Balle pulls them together in her cool, calm, measured prose, condensing them into spare and essential features, and reinventing the quest narrative as a means of exploring what it is like to be trapped while you have the freedom to go almost anywhere.

We leave the new group of characters at the end with Tara wondering whether this is more like the end of a story or the beginning. If you know, you know… and they all do know that something is about to happen.

1. As Dennis Zhou wrote in the New York Times:

A presiding interest in Balle’s writing is what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called the “paradigm shift”: the notion that human knowledge progresses through seismic disruptions that force us to revise our understanding of how reality functions. As Tara documents her investigations with a rigor that approaches the scientific method, her journal entries trace the ways that her new reality is no longer commensurate with the old: Now that she lives across a rift in time from her loved ones, she must rethink everything from how she interacts with her environment to the nature of love and domesticity.