Well, it’s the 18th of November again—at the start of the book, for the 1144th time. On the Calculation of Volume III finds Tara Selter once again awaking on a day in which everyone—or nearly everyone—awakes with no memory that they’ve lived this day before. If you’ll recall from Volume II, Tara was traveling around chasing seasons around the world and the cliffhanger of Volume II is that it appears someone else is having the same experience.
That’s where Volume III opens: Tara Selter has met a man who also has agency within the apparent timeloop. This immediately sets Volume III apart; it’s an engaging progression of the story as Tara and Henry get to bounce theories off of each other. Tara, with a dedicated academic interest in Roman history (ha!), is auditing a University lecture and due to her cultivated observational powers, she notices a man—and he notices her— as someone who was not there the previous day.
This entry feels more personal, knowing that the other character has shared experience. In previous volumes, there were some tender moments between her and her sister and her husband, but there was always a sense of futility knowing that they would reset. Here, we get more of a connection, a sigh of relief that Tara is no longer alone. What Balle does that is brilliant, though, is giving just a hint of unease in a moment of respite. Tara acknowledges that there’s “a promise of more conversations, but not only that” (32). She takes a moment to reflect that “there is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibility for their baggage” (32). Balle subverts the idea of an uncomplicated companionship and adds just that extra bit of tension to an apocalyptic scenario.
Still, they get along well enough, mostly—they tell each other about their first November 18ths. In Tara’s journal, she explains that “Henry insisted on recounting every last detail. He described the pattern and play of colors in the glass, or at least he tried, and I reciprocated with details of my own. So we sat there, each with our own hues, light, and sensations, attempting to throw them into a shared pool” (39). There’s a couple of noteworthy pieces here. First, is the idea of reciprocity and shared experience, but there’s a subtle contrast here with Tara’s experience. The two of them share their experiences, drawing specifically on the visible and tangible: “hues, light” and the “sensations.” Elsewhere in the book, though, Tara gets obsessed with sound. She hears sounds and sounds within sounds, listening for the subtle gradients of, for example, the screeching of a train track or a puddle splashing. It becomes clear they have different ways of navigating. They also have different experiences of time and Tara points out some of their contrasting views. Henry describes the eternal change of season between fall and winter and how “he had enjoyed walking around in all these dualities” (39). He describes “two discrete sets of hours” and being between worlds, “parallel realities” (39).Henry “felt at home when, every so often, sunlight fell through the windows of his apartment: brightly colored through the upper panes and almost pristinely clear through the lower” (39). He has a clear division within him. A world of straight lines. Tara’s life feels more like concentric circles.
Where it gets really interesting seeing their different perspectives about what is happening. Tara’s revisits some ideas explored in previous volumes, including the concern that she’s a monster devouring the world, or that she’s at the bottom of a Roman urn inside a larger Roman urn inside a larger Roman urn ad infinitum (apologies for the mixed Roman-Latin presentation). Tara and Henry get into a heated philosophical debate about history, which I adored. I’ll try not to cite the entire passage I wrote down, but Henry sets out the idea that history has been about men and typically doesn’t focus on women’s concerns.
But here’s the thing.
Tara is a historical materialist. She is interested in the practical, tangible details of history (she was researching the significance of wheat harvests for Ancient Romans, for instance). So, when Henry offers his perspective about history Tara reflects: “Did he think that history was the history of power and men? That it was about great battles and great decisions? That I wasn’t interested in history because it wasn’t about me? Or about some kind of women’s world, which was my world?” (51). Henry protests that that is a mischaracterization, “but still, he thought I must feel excluded from historical accounts since they had never been written by women, for women, or about women’s lives” (51). He qualifies a few exceptions “as if women were the last passengers hastily pulled aboard a departing train” (51). Tara argues that if he was right, “shouldn’t it follow that I would only be interested in women’s things? If I could only be interested in women’s history, then surely he must also believe that my interest was confined to women’s things. Did he really think my interest in things was limited to hairpins and pot lids?” (51). Henry rephrases and says that he understood and she says she doesn’t understand how he could understand—a little obstinately, she admits. She asks a question that reinforces the way material historical realities cut across gender divides: “What then was this world of women that should interest me? Was a ship from the Bronze Age found on the seabed off the coast of Turkey more his history than mine? Were a thousand pounds of copper and a hundred pounds of tin intended for ships and weapons and axes the real history, after which a few pounds could be spared for the women? For hairpins and a trivet for the stockpot?” (51). She continues with even more pointed questions:
“And when did something become women’s history, anyway? Was it only after the ship with its raw materials and metals docked at the harbor, once those metals had been transported and processed and finally fashioned into a hairpin that it became my history? Did the raw materials belong to men’s history? And was he trying to say that there were two histories: one with wars and laws, with ideas and political decisions, with grand exploits and weapons and transports by sea and axes and cutthroat razors, and another with hairpins and kitchen utensils, with childbirth and children’s tears, and perhaps a loom in the corner?” (51-52).
In addition to the critical considerations about history, I also appreciate that Tara is essentially reframing the conversation around the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. If we reconstruct a ship one piece at a time, at what point is it no longer the same ship? Tara connects it to the notion of history: at what point are things disconnected from one another? At one point does our interconnectedness fall apart?
Tara admits that she doesn’t know why she pressed the point so hard. She comments, though, that she felt like she and Henry were in a boat in the middle of nowhere and not knowing where they were going but that he suddenly was sawing their boat to pieces. She reinforces: “Our history was shared, I said. We have always split the work. Don’t tell me women didn’t take part in wars or that men never scrubbed floors. History is full of female spies and male housekeepers, I said” (52). She goes on to question how many times animals were caught in traps invented by women, and whether snares and knives are women’s history rather than men’s. “How much grain,” she asks, “did he think had been harvested by women? Should harvesting tools then be counted as men’s history?” (52) I’m lingering on this just because I find it so powerful and I suspect critical to Balle’s entire project. We’re dealing with time. We’re dealing with time not moving forward. We need to grapple with the implications of the progression or non-progression of time.
While I think this is a rich passage, I think probably my favourite reflection of Tara’s historical interests can be summarized in one phrase:
“I wasn’t interested in the outcome of the war but in the buttons on the soldier’s uniform” (49).
The book isn’t purely theoretical, of course—but it is slow moving. Between the first three volumes, we’re looking at 517 pages and the moments that could be classified as plot events are few and far between. Perhaps that’s why I found the midpoint of Volume III so startling. Tara has gone back home and lurks around her house like a ghost, not interfering with her husband’s routine as she did in the first book. As she gets more obsessed with sound, she hears a bang at the door and is alarmed: this is new. The audience feels the suspense rise as they realize that this is something new. She opens the door: “Her name was Olga Periti. She was not a bird. She was stuck in the eighteenth of November. She needed my help, she said. She spoke in English. She asked if I was Tara Selter and which language I preferred to speak” (105). It’s a gutpunch of a moment because not only has the number of people repeating November 18th increased by one, but it sparks so many more questions: How does she know this is Tara? How did she get her address? Why is she here?
The book progresses with an increasing cast of people who have found one another. Still no explanations for why they’re living the same day, but watching them seek each other out is a compelling turn. It gives the book a much more human quality where these oddball companions bump and clash with their visions for the ‘new world.’
Long story short, we build to a party of four partway through the novel and Tara outlines her experiences to them. She tells them about her husband and attempts to bring him into the 18th of November. She describes “sneaking up on the sounds and catching a smidgen of what is lost. About sounds that ceased to be empty shells once you got closer. A world that opened up” (125). She talks about her days becoming shapeless and the unravelling of her pattern: “soundless, unbounded, and utterly without shape” (125).
As the group grows, we have more positions to tend to. Olga had previously met Ralf, but the two separated after an argument about what they should be doing day-to-day. Tara goes about her days trying to cause as little harm as possible (her and Henry eat garbage because ‘good food’ does still disappear). Tara wants to leave “only the faintest traces” (127). Olga, however, wants to change the world in a more systemic sense, the specifics of which remain somewhat ambiguous. Olga’s friend Ralf, however, operates in a more localized sense. He wants to research every death, accident, trauma, and prevent them from happening—a task so totally massive that only people repeating the same day over and over would be able to achieve. Olga thinks this piecemeal approach is pointless, while Ralf suggests that acting locally is creating a new system. Ralf operates under the assumption that the day will, at some point, resume—neither Tara nor I are convinced. Olga objects to Ralf’s approach because “he was not solving the real issues. The structural ones. The fundamental ones. The foundation itself” (128). Again, Balle offers a compelling several pages of philosophical debate between characters and then works towards one line that is representative of the entire debate: “Ralf thought Olga wanted to drain the sea of water. Olga asserted that Ralf wanted to correct commas” (128).
Ralf goes about saving people about to die in accidents and draws the rest of the group to the idea with a grand vision of developing a system of warnings. He literally gives a slideshow presentation, which has a touch of humour to it, making the entire project feel a bit like a timeshare. It sets us up (along with another twist at the end) for the fourth part of this 7-part series.
Balle’s writing is somewhat documentary in its style. Tara reports objectively, almost like a scientific journal. At the same time, her voice offers some rich detail. Despite what I said about her emphasis on sound rather than sight, there’s a great series of imagistic moments. When describing conceptions of time, for example, Tara reports that Olga sees time as “tectonic plates sliding beneath each other, different layers of time” (164). Tara, by contrast, sees time “more like the edges of lawns or like weeds, or hedges and flower beds and things that merge together or overshadow each other as they grow” (164). If we return to the moment that Tara and Henry compare their first days, she also presents Henry’s description with rich detail: “The trees were still orange, golden leaves lay scattered on the ground, but winter was in the air. A crispness. As if Autumn was inside things and winter filled the gaps between them” (39). Tara recounts the visual details he provides and then says, “I told him about the sounds of the city, the philosopher’s tooth, the shoes I had followed. [...] I had found myself following far too many sounds, and each time I got closer, I discovered other sounds within them. Behind the hiss of the coffee machine, there was a heavier, metallic noise. Behind the clattering of the tram, there was a sliding sound, an additional screech you didn’t hear at first” (79). She goes on like that a little further and I find it such a rich way of thinking through the world. It’s as though Balle’s narrator becomes more perceptive and, in turn, the journal she’s writing becomes more lush and precise in its descriptions.
I think Balle is working on a very special project here and if On the Calculation of Volume III is any indication, I suspect that the series will become more engaging, more bizarre. More compelling.
See you next time for November 18th, presumably, November 18 #1893 next. Happy reading!
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