Recent Reading: On the Calculation of Volume I-IV by Solvej Balle
There are tropes that have been around for so long, and become so codified within pop culture, that they hardly feel like science fiction anymore. Within that group, the time loop surely has pride of place. Its original popularizer, 1993's Groundhog Day, resonated more with Buddhist philosophy than any specific genre writers, and in the intervening decades the time loop has showed up in everything from cop shows to romantic comedies. So when I heard that a time loop story had been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, I was surprised but not flabbergasted. There's already so much slippage between science fiction and mainstream fiction these days—so much that we're inventing terms like "imprint SF" to try to articulate how different publishers and training paths affect the materials being published—that the real surprise was not a mainstream-published time loop story, but the fact that it was considered sufficiently literary to attract the Booker's attention.
Having read the first four books in Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume—a sequence of seven novellas, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland (books I and II), and Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (books III and onward)—it's clear that something much more unusual is going on. There's no doubting these books' litfic cred, but at the same time, Balle is thinking more deeply, and more interestingly, about the time loop premise than just about anyone who has played with it in decades. In fact, I am going to lay down a challenge. At the end of this year, five books in the series will have been published in English, with the final two slated for publication next year. If On the Calculation of Volume does not receive at least a nomination for the best series Hugo award in 2027 or 2028, it will be an indication of that category's absolute irrelevance.
Tara Selter is a rare books dealer. On November 17th, she leaves her home in Clairon-sous-Bois, where she and her husband and business partner, Thomas, live in a house built by Thomas's grandfather, for a purchasing expedition in Paris. On November 18th, she wakes up in her hotel room, attends meetings with fellow dealers, and goes to sleep. The next day, she wakes up and discovers that it is still November 18th. And then again. And again. We know how this works, though Tara—who is a sort of quintessential protagonist of a European literary fiction novel, innocent of nearly all technology and pop culture more recent than the 1980s—apparently does not. Nevertheless, her reaction is so philosophical that it comes full circle into pragmatism. Something has happened that Tara can neither understand nor control; what matters now is how she lives her life in the wake of it.
For the rest of books I and II, Tara undergoes, in her own understated and not entirely conscious way, several of the stages of grief. First comes denial: on realizing that November 19th and the rest of her life after it appear to be beyond reach, Tara's first reaction is to try to simulate that life with the means available to her. She travels back to Clairon and attempts to pick up her life with Thomas, every morning explaining to him anew what has happened to her. (Unlike other time loop protagonists, Tara doesn't return to the same place upon the loop's reset. This allows for more expansive storytelling, though it also requires some delicate maneuvering; when Tara rents a hotel room, for example, she has to request a room that wasn't occupied the day before, lest she wake up next to the person who went to sleep there on November 17th.)
When this simulation becomes untenable—tired of explaining herself to Thomas every day and feeling an increasing distance between them as her November 18ths add up, Tara moves into the house's spare room and haunts Thomas like a ghost—she switches to bargaining. Book II contains a stunning sequence in which Tara attempts to recreate the passage of a year through movement in space rather than time, first traveling to her parents' home and asking them to throw a Christmas celebration in November, and then working out where she needs to travel to see winter's snows, spring's blossoms, and summer's warmth on the same fall day. Depression follows soon after. Inspired by a Roman sestertius she purchased on the first November 18th, Tara immerses herself in the study of the Roman empire, seeing an echo of its famous logistical organization in her predicament. The empire, she concludes, was essentially a system of containers, each holding another and another; November 18th is a container in which Tara has been placed, whose walls are too high for her to climb.
If you're wondering when anger will turn up, that is very much not the sort of person Tara is. Even when not in the grips of depression, she often prefers to let days, weeks, months (inasmuch as such measurements still have meaning) go by in a single location, observing the minute details and listening to the sounds of ordinary life that is taking place just beyond her grasp. For the first two books of the sequence, this tendency might feel inevitable. This is a litfic version of a time loop story, and therefore Tara behaves like a litfic heroine, inward-looking and passive. But Balle, who handles her unique structure with an impressive lightness—each of these books feels like a self-contained unit that is also unquestionably part of a larger story—has a great facility for twisting and expanding the contours of her premise in the final pages of each volume. Right at the end of book II, Tara reveals that she has met another person who, like her, is trapped in November 18th.
As Tara befriends her fellow looper, Henry, and then others like them, we discover that her passivity and philosophical attitude are as strange to them as they are to us. Even her obsessive diary-keeping, her careful logging of the number of times she has repeated November 18th (the books' chapter titles indicate the current number of repetitions) strikes them as unnecessary and solipsistic. Unlike her, they still believe that November 19th is attainable, and one of them, Ralf, takes an approach that feels positively Bill Murray-ish, reasoning that he can only advance to the 19th by making the 18th as perfect as possible. To this end he recruits Tara, Henry, and all other loopers to gather information about accidents and tragedies throughout the day. If they prevent all this loss of life, he reasons, they will be permitted to move forward in time.
Whether Ralf is correct remains to be seen—though Tara is joined in her skepticism towards his theory by most of the other loopers, and in general his approach feels out of step with the series's tone. Books III and IV are nevertheless more interested in the community that Tara and the other loopers create within November 18th. Taking over an abandoned house, they form a sort of commune that simulates, more successfully than Tara was able to achieve with Thomas, the life that they have all lost. This is already a significant innovation on the time loop premise, but it pales next to what feels like Balle's most original, and most disquieting, worldbuilding choice. Although her loopers are trapped in the same day, they still experience time. They age and get sick. When injured, it takes them time to heal. One of them even becomes pregnant. More disturbingly, even though the loopers can't reach November 19th or make large scale changes to the 18th—for Ralf to prevent an accident, he has to do so again and again on every November 18th—they do affect the world in their immediate vicinity. Objects that they acquire remain with them if kept near their body. Some experiments with planting seeds achieve a limited success. Where other time loop stories explore the implications of a life without consequences, On the Calculation of Volume asks how one can live when the effect one has on the world is something to be worked out through trial and error.
One of these effects, which Tara grasps early in her looping and is unable to find a solution to, is that the loopers end up consuming their environment. They cannot, like the protagonists of Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, walk into the same restaurant every day and order the same dish, because eventually the supply of ingredients for that dish will dwindle and disappear. This makes them, Tara concludes, something monstrous, a parasite on the world that will inevitably devour it. Though she tries to encourage preservationist habits among her fellow loopers—buying food that was on the verge of being tossed, and reducing consumption—as the community of loopers swells into the double digits, they quickly find themselves overgrazing their surroundings.
To the best of my knowledge, no writer, within or outside of genre science fiction, has taken such an original and challenging approach to the time loop story. It should go without saying that unlike all other time loop protagonists, Tara can't rely on waking up the next morning should she happen to die one November 18th. But as one member of the commune points out, the same is true of anyone the loopers happen to kill; their unique effect on time means that the accidents they cause can never be prevented in future loops. Far from being a story about living outside the world, then, On the Calculation of Volume reveals itself to be a story about being a new—and extremely dangerous—sort of human.
Because this is still a story told from within the conventions of literary fiction, the loopers' response to this realization is to have a lot of conversations about it. In book IV, the commune has periodic meetings whose topics are chosen at random from slips of paper submitted by the members. Sometimes this means practical discussions, such as how to renovate the basement of the house they're squatting in into a workshop. Other times the group discusses what to call themselves, or whether they should divide time into new units of measurement now that the week and month have lost all meaning. In one of the book's most delightfully strange passages, the commune organizes a symposium at a nearby convention center, where members give talks on their theories for the cause of their predicament, and debate ideas for ending it or surviving it more comfortably.
It is perhaps the fullest expression of how this series fuses a serious consideration of its premise with an equally serious understanding of its literary genre. By the end of book IV, the chapter titles indicating how many November 18ths Tara and the other loopers have experienced have climbed to around ten years, and though the characters themselves do not linger on this fact, their very failure to address it feels like a pointed choice. This is not an adventurous interlude to which there will be an inevitable solution. It is Tara's life, however strange and unsatisfying. Despite outliers like Ralf, and despite Tara herself being a bit of an outlier in how passively she accepts her situation, the people with whom she shares her predicament react to it like ordinary—albeit, for the most part, middle class and educated—people. They paper over despair with projects that may be futile, embark on relationships that may be doomed, and somehow manage to discover true connection, and moments of genuine revelation, in the mundanity of their now-not-so-mundane life.
For as long as it has existed as a fictional trope, the time loop has had only one possible ending. The loop must end, or the whole thing will feel, by definition, unfinished. Balle's innovations on her premise are so bold, however, that by the end of the fourth volume in the series—which throws yet another wrench into the works of her worldbuilding—one finds oneself genuinely uncertain what ending she is aiming at. Will Tara and the other loopers reach November 19th? Will they start their loop all over again? Will they live out their whole lives and die on November 18th? This, too, is a reason to be incredibly excited by this series. As a literary work and a work of science fiction, it is a major accomplishment, and I hope that more readers of the fantastic genres will discover it.
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