Solvej Balle’s Novels Rewire the Time Loop
Before Tara Selter, the protagonist of “On the Calculation of Volume,” a series by the Danish author Solvej Balle, gets trapped in a time loop, she is one half of a unit called T. & T. Selter. It’s a joint marital and business concern in the fictional village of Clairon-sous-Bois, France: an antiquarian-book dealership that Tara runs with her husband, Thomas, who shares her devotion to material history and her flair for noticing. “Maybe we are a weather system,” Tara considers. “We look at one another, we touch one another, we condense.”
Their twosome ruptures when Tara, who has travelled to Paris for an auction, wakes up on what should be the morning of November 19th to shimmers of déjà vu: the headlines in the newspaper look familiar; at breakfast, the same hotel guest drops the same slice of bread. A horrified Tara soon realizes that she is living in a repeating November 18th, while Thomas and the rest of the world go on without her.
The story, which unfolds in slim, strange installments, becomes, among other things, a parable of marital loneliness. Balle’s time loop operates according to inscrutable rules: although Tara’s day refreshes, her body continues to age and her geographical location can change. Certain objects that she acquires, such as a toothbrush, stay with her, whereas others disappear overnight. When Tara first returns home to Clairon, she and Thomas orbit each other in their bucolic cottage, and she observes him with a keen tenderness, listening for his gentle thuds on the floorboards. On some days, Tara lets her husband in on her predicament; on others, she trails him like a shadow. The strategy she chooses makes no difference. Every morning, his memory resets.
Balle’s series has grown into a cult hit, both in Scandinavia, where the first five of a planned seven books have been released in the original Danish, and, more recently, in the U.S., where New Directions has published English translations of Books I through III. (Barbara Haveland rendered the first two; Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell deliver the third, out this month.) The novels, composed of Tara’s diary entries, meld metaphysical inquiry with an intimate attention to the natural world and the domestic sphere. Balle’s prose—repetitive, hypnotic, and as balanced as a small plane—sustains an atmosphere of illuminated ordinariness. Here is “a drawer being opened, wood sliding across wood.” There, a light drizzle builds into rain “bucketing down.” The effect of the time-loop device is propulsive yet lulling: the premise grabs us with its gimmickry, then it amplifies the motions and textures that we already know.
Under the magnifying lens of Balle’s conceit, marriage appears hyperreal, a peaceable yet doomed circuit of pleasant meals, purposeful silences, and household routines that fall gradually out of synch. To Tara, Thomas dwindles to the sounds he makes when carrying his teacup up and down the stairs. On day three hundred and thirty-nine, when Tara implores him to join her on a trip to Paris, a familiar impasse turns strikingly literal: “He didn’t want to go with me. He wanted to stay in his pattern.” Eventually, despite their best efforts—the pair movingly tries to merge their time lines over long nights spent awake together—Tara leaves her house and her husband behind.“Too many days had come between us,” she says.
A current of grief and longing runs through the series. Condemned to an eternal autumn, Tara looks out at the tree in her garden and can see only absence: “the lack of winter branches covered in frost, the lack of spring blossoms, the lack of green leaves.” She swears that she can hear other seasons “sighing through the chinks” of her repeating November 18th. If the series’ conceit literalizes the mismatches in our intimate relationships, it also dramatizes a person grappling with her finitude. Like all of us, Tara has a limited window in which to accumulate sensations, to participate in the happenings of the world. Death, in the guise of the nineteenth, presses up against her time line, both haunting and evading her. She sits on the cusp of a future that she knows she will not see.
Upon entering the time loop, Tara cycles restlessly through phases and responses, trying to decide how to use the days. First, she wills herself and Thomas into a sweet somnolence—“we made the horizon vanish,” she writes—and then she craves clarity, drawing up tables and charts. She can’t decide whether to keep up her diary. On day one hundred and eighty-five, she supposes that “sentences are not necessary.” On day one hundred and eighty-six, she doubles back: “But if sentences are not necessary why do I sit down at the table and write?” Her life becomes periodized, with stretches spent in Bremen and Düsseldorf. An antique coin that she bought for Thomas on the original November 18th becomes a talisman, vanishing from the time line and then resurfacing.
