Life is full of repetitions. Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I draws on the conventions of time loop stories, perhaps with Groundhog Day as its most accessible analogue. Yet, for me, this year also feels like a bit of a time loop in my reading. I feel like I’m in a year of reading novels about women in isolated, repetitious lives that defy explanation. I’m thinking in particular about Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall, in which a wall mysteriously descends on the protagonist, who journals the repetitious cycles of her life.
Life is full of repetitions, but Solve Balle’s On The Calculation of Volume I does something unique in its world-building. The rules are never made transparent for how, exactly, the time loop works. Tara begins the day in Paris but returns home to her husband on her second November eighteenth and is allowed to wake up there. In experiments with her husband, the objects they have displaced gradually disappear or reposition themselves when they’re unnoticed. Tara’s bank account resets each “new” day, but the purchases she makes largely seem to stay with her—so much so that stores start running out of the tea she buys every day. There are cracks and fissures and ambiguities.
Life is full of repetitions, and Solve Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I demonstrates how what is unusual compels us toward reflection. There is a passage early in the text where Tara reflects as follows:
It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable. (32-33)
Similar to The Wall, there’s a sort of resignation, at times, that this is just how things are and will be. Of course, after more than three hundred days of the same day, she also degenerates into paranoiac lines of thinking. She starts thinking of how to escape the repetition. Is it best to be a butterfly flitting about and waiting for change? Or to be a bull in a china shop wrecking everything? Or try to fix something or observe something she never did before? These desperate times (er…time) create escape fantasies to try to restore her to the probable.
Life is full of repetitions, but On the Calculation of Volume I explores some genre conventions in a way I’ve not seen before. It’s kind of interesting to class the novel as science fiction. It’s a sort of accidental time travel novel but rather than having a scientist trying to deduce how to make time travel happen, we have a character who is meant to overcome it. For the first portion of the novel, she attempts what could be considered a version of the scientific method. She begins by documenting observable phenomena and using it to convince her husband that she is stuck in a time loop—to his credit, he believes her (which is its own interesting inversion of time loop tales). The two conduct research and consult one another, though it becomes too laborious for Tara to explain everything they’ve already tried to limit the number of false start hypotheses. Their experiments prove fruitless, unmanageable, unpredictable. So, she moves out and tries to pay attention to the minutiae to see what kinds of things stop following patterns. For instance, does the woman who drops her groceries drop 5 coins instead of 6?
Life is full of repetitions, but On the Calculation of Volume I sets up a really interesting distinction between ghosts and monsters. When Tara eats a leek from the garden and it is not there the next day, she realizes her capacity for consumption: “It was me who made things disappear. That must be it. I am living in a time that eats up the world” (103). She continues on to note that every day her husband’s world is repaired; he seems to leave no mark on the world, leading Tara to conclude, “Thomas is a ghost and I am a monster”(103). She continues, “It is time that has done this. Without me Thomas is a ghost, but I am a monster, a beast, a pest” (103). The meditation is a compelling one and continues as follows:
It’s not that I didn’t know this. It’s not that I haven’t seen the shelves growing barer and barer, but now it’s a problem. It makes a difference. If Thomas is a ghost and I am a monster then the distance between us is greater than I thought. Thomas leaves no trail in the world, I eat it up. He is a pattern in the house, I am a monster in the guest room. If I go out there we will be two monsters. I will drag him into my world and we will eat for two. It is me who makes the difference. He is a ghost and ghosts haunt. They return, again and again. Monsters rampage through the world and leave it devastated. (103)
Monsters-as-metaphors is already fruitful ground to walk, and Balle adds to the discourse of consumption. It’s a compelling inversion. Given that Tara is largely imperceptible, haunting the same day, the same streets, day in and (well, actually) day in again, she would appear to be a ghost. Yet she’s on a different plane entirely, consuming more and more of the world that others have left behind. A scavenger beast. That idea of ravenous consumption gets paired with the scientific method a little later on when Tara buys a telescope to examine alterations in the night sky:
You get huge, hungry eyes, you intrude, you invade. You meddle in the affairs of the firmament and I can tell that the more familiar I become with the night sky, the more stars that are identified, the more of the moon’s surface I see, the bigger I get. I invade space, I fill the world. That is another way of being a monster. In the darkness. In the garden. With ravenous eyes. A monster clad in wool. (125)
The book is compelling in the way it engages with science, consumption, probability, and finitude. What would it mean, for instance, to experience every single thing that one day has to offer? Even just one slice of the infinite is still infinite—and are we ravenous beasts for wanting our share?
Life is full of repetitions, even as On the Calculation of Volume I concludes. There are very few resolutions. What kind of thing is time? Is it a unit of measurement? A substance? A creature? Solvej Balle offers us some deep questions which, I’m sure, will only be addressed when we move forward in time. That is, when we read the remaining six volumes of On the Calculation of Volume.
As an aside, how fun is it that repetition is built into the title of the book itself? In a multi-volume series, you’re forced to say On the Calculation of Volume Volume I.
Life is full of repetitions. Happy reading.
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