On the Calculation of Volume is a seven-book series by Danish writer Solvej Balle. It follows Tara Selter, a middle-aged woman who lives in a town just outside Paris. She runs an antiquarian book business with her husband, Thomas. What makes Tara special is that for the past four months she has relived the same day over and over. Every morning, she wakes up and finds that it is once again November 18th.
Balle first started work on the project in 1987, six years before the movie Groundhog Day came out and became shorthand for that particular form of time-loop story. The massive popularity of that film might have discouraged most of us, and Balle certainly did her best to abandon the idea, but it simply would not leave her. Instead, she has found herself in a time loop of her own, working on this series of novels for almost 40 years.
The first book of the series – published in Danish in 2020 and in English translation by Barbara J Haveland in 2024 – quickly built a fanbase and met critical acclaim. It was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Fiction in the US and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize; the first three volumes, taken together, have also won the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize. So far, six of the seven volumes have been published in Danish; Balle is working on the concluding volume. Book Three (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) has just been released in English.
Given how much time has passed, I wonder whether she can even remember how it all started.
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“My very first book is about a woman on an uninhabited island in the Pacific,” Balle explains. “I was 24 when it was published and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. But afterwards I realised that I was actually playing with time.
“That was back in 1987. I was staying in Shakespeare and Company in Paris, where everybody seemed to have read Ulysses. So, I had to do that too, of course. And then I just thought that it would be fun to write a story about a day, not just like Ulysses, a day that contains a lot, but a day that repeats itself. I was quite interested in [Samuel] Beckett’s novels as well; his micro-novels especially, like Mal Vu Mal Dit [Ill Seen Ill Said].
“And then, at one point I dropped my little travel alarm clock, and it stopped. I thought, oh my goodness, I have to write this book.”
I put it to her that few writers could endure the torture of working on a book project for so many years.
“It’s terrifying, isn’t it? I tried to throw it out several times, because I thought that if I started to write this, I would spoil it. It’s like when you used to put film in a camera. I felt that if I started to develop the film, I would ruin it.
“So, I had to leave it on the back burner for many, many years. I simply couldn’t grasp the form. How would I tell it? Would there be a narrator who heard the story of this person who’d been stuck in time? Would it be the narrator who was telling the story, or was it the person stuck who was telling the story?
“When I finally started to write what ended up being the beginning of Book One, it was in 1999 or 2000. By then I had realised, okay, this is how it’s going to be narrated: somebody listens to her husband. I felt as if I had found her manuscript somewhere and I have translated it into Danish.”
Balle has published several books of micro prose. The English edition of On the Calculation of Volume is presented as a series of short separate entries, like a blog or diary. I wondered whether that was important to the text.
“That was something I had to fight for actually as they wanted to squeeze it together. The whole point is that there is space between the elements because it’s all about having a pause. So, we need these white spaces. Those blank lines are my lifelines, so to speak, for the project.”
Though she had enjoyed some critical success with previous work, she decided to self-publish the book initially (it has since been picked up by Faber in the UK and Ireland).
“My book, According to the Law, was published in quite a few countries but it wasn’t a bestseller in any way. I felt like I was with the publisher on dispensation, as though the not-so-best-selling writers were allowed in as a kind of shopfront.
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“After a couple of years with one of my books, they said, ‘We don’t want to spend money on stocks, so we’ll kill this book, and you can write another one.’ I felt that was really unjust, so I thought, no, I’m going to do it myself. I’m not playing this game. I’m not having babies that are strangled after two years.”
In Groundhog Day, the main character, played by Bill Murray, has a sense of panic and bewilderment about his situation. In Balle’s novel, however, we join the main character, Tara Selter, at day #121. By this point, she has already started to come to terms with her situation. It creates an uneasy calm that makes her more companionable as a narrator and yet also strangely distant.
“She couldn’t be a drama queen. I would be bored to mess with somebody being hysterical. I have a feeling that she’s not telling us everything. If we were sitting with her, having a chat with her about it, she might actually be more dramatic. But she’s writing, so the narrative has been cooled down. She’s sitting with cool words on a piece of paper. We don’t see her in the situation.”
At first, Tara tries to confide in her husband, Thomas – but by the time we join the narrative, an estrangement has already begun. Tara listens to him move around the house while she hides out in a bedroom upstairs. We are left wondering about their relationship – are they so close that they are each fully secure and independent, or has their marriage become stagnant?
“There are a couple of things I’m not absolutely certain about. I’m still puzzled about Thomas. It’s as if one side of the relationship is almost ideal. He trusts her, he believes in everything she says. Tara describes it as an ideal relationship, but then on the other hand, what is really happening? I don’t know, because it doesn’t resemble any of my relationships. They live with the furniture of his grandad. There’s a certain overstability in it that nobody could live with.”
A risk of time-hopping stories is that they can get bogged down over-explaining themselves. On the Calculation of Volume manages to avoid this, with Balle happy to leave elements of mystery in order to let the story flow better.
Sometimes an older person might think it’s unrealistic or idealistic to want to change the world
— Solvej Balle
“I felt that there couldn’t be too much machinery. If I could hear it start to click, then I thought, no, no, there’s something wrong here.”
Each of the three books published in English so far has a distinct quality of its own. In Book One, Tara comes to terms with her extraordinary situation. This volume is sensory, observational, reflective and interior. In Book Two, movement is introduced, as Tara travels around Europe in an attempt to once again experience the seasons. In Book Three, the scope of the story expands as Tara discovers others who are also stuck in November 18th.
“It was part of the idea all the time. I actually thought that she was going to meet other people much earlier in the story. It’s about having somebody to disagree with. I feel sometimes that Tara is a little bit too unengaged in things, so I was happy to have these people to challenge her a bit.”
At one point in the book, a moral dilemma emerges. The younger characters, Olga and Ralph, believe they should use the day to improve the world, whereas the older characters, Henry and Tara, have been trying not to do that.
“It’s possibly a generational thing. Sometimes an older person might think it’s unrealistic or idealistic to want to change the world. Henry and Tara are quite afraid of actually making footsteps, going out and interacting with the world, because we might be wrong, we might do the wrong things. It’s not simple to know whether we should try to withdraw from acting in the world, or whether we should go out and do things.”
As Balle approaches the point of completing the project, perhaps she is becoming more aware of how it is being received.
“I’m always worried that people will be disappointed by the next one, and then the next one, because they’re all different. We’ll see. You’ll think it’s weird. But it is weird from the beginning, isn’t it?”
With her candour and easy geniality, Balle comes across as a writer who is comfortable thinking aloud about her work. Having carried the project alone for so long, it must be a relief to finally discuss and share it with others. This is certainly a work that has found, or generated, its own community of enthusiastic readers.
The time loop is a premise that is confounding for its obviousness and elusiveness. Yet Balle is endlessly resourceful in gaining fingerholds in the story that she works into wider possibilities. She finds clever lines of inquiry that allow Tara to examine the fabric of her broken time, but there are also wider resonances. In a post-Covid world, where the entire planet experienced a suspended reality, it is all too real to imagine, “What if this never ends?”
There are questions about ethical intervention in the world – in dark times, the urge to act is overwhelming, but how do we avoid doing harm? Balle also raises an important point about sustainability and whether civilisation is consuming the very raft that keeps it afloat. And then there is Tara Selter herself. A calm, identifiably European everywoman, lost in time but never lost to herself.
Balle layers these major and minor elements into a story that seems both outside time and yet immediately relevant. With each new instalment, there is the growing sense that we are witnessing the unfolding of a potential contemporary classic.
On the Calculation of Volume I, II & III are published by Faber & Faber. Rónán Hession is the author of Leonard & Hungry Paul, Panenka and Ghost Mountain
