by David Beer
Danish author Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume, the first book translated from a series of five, could be thought of as time loop realism, if such a thing is imaginable. Tara Selter is trapped, alone, in a looping 18th of November. Each morning simply brings yesterday again. Tara turns to her pen, tracking the loops in a journal. Hinting at how the messiness of life can take form in texts, the passages Tara scribbles in her notebooks remain despite the restarts. She can’t explain why this is, but it allows her to build a diary despite time standing still. The capability of writing to curb the boredom and capture lost moments brings some comfort.
There are no chapters, no endings, occasionally we are given the number of 18ths of November Tara has endured. Those occasional numerical markers replace dates in the diary. As a consequence, the volume of repetitions becomes the key metric. The day takes on extra dimensions when the limits of what is possible in a single 24-hours can be explored so intricately. Unlike similar conceptions, Tara can move around, waking wherever she ended the previous version of the same day. She also ages, a burn on her hand heals to a scar, and certain things stay where she put them too. The absences also remain. Repeated food purchases leave gaps on shop shelves. Inexplicably, those gaps remain. Yet it is the absence of uncertainty that weighs most heavily on Tara. When you know what is coming, unpredictability is lost, it has to be actively sought-out instead.
It is the combination of Tara’s agency, the traces of her repetitions and the materiality of the experienced loops that give this time loop its realist property. We see how reliving the same day alters perspectives on people, places, space, nature, and so on. There is no when and no if to the story, what we get instead is what happens to someone experiencing endless predictability. At first, the things that are the same stick-out to Tara. A piece of dropped bread that falls slowly to the floor, a rain shower, footsteps on stairs, all become overwhelmingly familiar. Over time, the inconsistencies start to become a preoccupation. Tara can’t understand why certain objects stay whilst others return to their original location. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect the outcome of a major temporal disruption to be well-ordered and logical. Read more »