Home » Denmark » Solvej Balle » Om udregning af rumfang 1 (On The Calculation Of Volume 1)
Solvej Balle: Om udregning af rumfang 1 (On The Calculation Of Volume 1)
Tara Selter and her husband Thomas live in Clairon-sous-Bois, in the South of France. They run their own antiquarian book dealership from their home. Thomas does the cataloguing and shipping, Tara travels around buying books at fairs and auctions and from other dealers. On 17 November, she sets off for Bordeaux . She buys a few books, some of which she ships back to her home and then heads for Paris, staying at the Hotel du Lison (like many places in this book, fictitious). Before going to bed she reports back to Thomas. She visits various bookshops and makes some purchases, ending up at the shop of Philip Maurel, an old friend. Philip’s girlfriend, Marie, turns up and they have something to eat, turning on an old gas heater, which had been hidden away. She wants to look at some coins, Philip’s main business, and inadvertently burns her hand on the heater. She treats it with cold water and then ice wrapped in a towel. After phoning Philip she goes to bed, her hand wrapped in ice. So ends, she thinks, her 18 November.
The next morning she goes dpown to breakfast. She picks up a newspaper but it is dated 18 November, not 19 November. She thinks nothing of it but then notices that another guest drops his toast on the floor, puts it in the bin and then gets a croissant. The same man did exactly the same thing yesterday. She checks the ATM, newspapers in a shop and other things. All confirm that it is 18 November. Again.
She returns to Philip’s shop and Marie is there. She does not recognise Tara. While Marie is distracted, she checks the gas heater. It is hidden away and covered in dust and has clearly not been used for some time, though her burn is still there. All the books she has bought the previous day have gone but the shops still have them and she buys them again.
She had an appointment for 19 November but it is not 19 November, so she goes home. She has told Thomas and he is perturbed. Neither of them has an explanation – hallucinations or memory blips, misunderstandings or misinterpretations, temporal loops or parallel universes, but we could get none of these to make sense.
Of course when she woke up the next day it was still 18 November. Thomas was surprised to see her, thinking she was still in Paris. She had to explain it all again to him as she did on the following days. When the book opens this has happened 121 times. There are some anomalies. The books she bought in Paris are still there, for example but a Roman coin she bought for Thomas has disappeared.
Now she is stuck, The postman will arrive at 10.41. The neighbour will pass the house at the same time. She has given up explaining to Thomas what happened so she hides from him, living in the guest room, knowing, of course exactly what he will be doing and when. He, of course assuming she is in Paris. She does reconnect with Thomas, not least to get his help in solving the mystery. They read books on time travel.. We read tales of pockets, loops and labyrinths in time. We found films about time travel and chronological shifts.. They talk about it. We debated perceptions of reality and mental dysfunctions, we considered whether I might be generating trains of fictional experiences or whether everyone else had been struck by some form of amnesia, or whether we had stepped into a wave of psychological incongruence.
She is back on her own as it has not worked with Thomas. It does not help neither has an explanation nor a solution. She has to buy her food from the local supermarket but as she buys the food and eats it, she runs out of her food and it is not replenished at the supermarket, so she has to go further afield. As she is somewhat restricted by Thomas’ movements, she decides to move out and look for an empty house, perhaps one for sale. But that is only a makeshift solution. It’s a problem I cannot solve. There are ghosts and monsters. Thomas is the ghost and I am the monster.
It is coming upo to 365 days since it first happened, I have the feeling there’s something I should see, that something new will break through when the year is up. That hairline cracks have already appeared She deliberately accosts Thomas in a local park and asks him to accompany her to Paris but he is reluctant. Clearly she will have to do it on her own. In Paris she looks for signs that something is changing and something relatively minor does change.
This is the first of what will be a seven volume series. At the time of writing (late 2024) Balle has written five in Danish and two have been translated into English. It is going to be interesting to see how she continues and, indeed, resolves the story (if she does). She has certainly got me interested, despite the rather odd title.
I would add that this book immediate;ly reminded me of the film Groundhog Day in which the character played by Bill Murray, a weatherman reporting on Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, wakes up every morning on the same day. The film is a comedy while the book under review is indefinitely not. There have been other books where characters repeat their lives such as Kate Atkinson‘s Life After Life and Ken Grimwood’s Replay. Both, of course, while fairly serious, were only one volume.
Publishing history
First published in 220 by Pelagraf
First published in English in 2024 by New Directions
Translator: Barbara J. Haveland