Such is the terrain of Balle’s first volume: a quiet meditation on marriage observed from both a terribly near and far distance. “Time has come between us,” Tara writes, a sentence that could easily speak to the gradual drift in any relationship. When she moves into the spare bedroom and decides to hide as a stowaway in her own house — for convenience, for not wanting to retell the story of the loop, on loop — it doesn’t feel far-fetched. When she covertly follows Thomas on his daily errands rather than walking beside him, Balle communicates something painful about the limits of sharing a life, and perhaps the limits of sharing time at all.
After nearly a year of Nov. 18s, Tara plans a “chance” encounter with Thomas in the woods. She asks him to return with her to Paris, to figure out where time went wrong. We aren’t surprised when he declines. Through the meticulous repetition of her own life, she has somehow become a stranger in it.
Book II finds Tara on the road, at first, intending “to jump into the 18th of November when it came around again, to grab hold, to clamber on board a recognizable time.” But a new plan emerges. She visits her family, and asks them to celebrate Christmas. (While the date is chronologically Christmas for her, it’s still and always Nov. 18 for them.) She craves the seasons and becomes something of a weather vane, traveling north and south to places that can simulate the temperatures of her perceived times of year. “A proper summer,” she writes. “A proper winter. As if you hadn’t done your job until you had delivered a certain sort of weather.” In Düsseldorf, she comes across crowds from a soccer match, a moment she hadn’t known her Nov. 18 to have contained, and feels a “faint frisson.” There are still ways to find surprise in what looks to be simply more of the same.
“On the Calculation of Volume” doesn’t present the time loop solely as a problem to be solved but as a condition of being alive. Who hasn’t walked through a day oblivious to the fact that it’s the beginning or the end of a certain type of day? By accepting that time has been changed, irrevocably, we can find a way to live inside it. And while time is a kind of container, the ultimate unknown is the measure of what tomorrow holds. “If I am to have a future,” Tara tells us, defiant, “I will have to build it myself.”
ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME: Book I | By Solvej Balle | Translated by Barbara J. Haveland | New Directions | 161 pp. | Paperback, $15.95
ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME: Book II | By Solvej Balle | Translated by Barbara J. Haveland | New Directions | 185 pp. | Paperback, $15.95