On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle

        Life is full of repetitions. Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I documents such repetitions in Tara Selter’s numbered journal entries as she wakes up on November eighteenth over and over and over again. Everyone else follows the same routines; the same woman drops the same piece of toast at breakfast, her same husband turns on the same light at the same time. And every day resets.

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.

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

        Perhaps I wasn’t in the best place for reading The Bradshaw Variations, but it feels like a rare miss from Rachel Cusk. Cusk’s second place and Kudos left me feeling enlightened, if depressed, and I thought the characters and scenes were so powerfully wrought. Turning to The Bradshaw Variations, I can appreciate its project of focusing on the minutiae of a banal life, but it felt like both too much and too little.

Cusk’s writing of the minutiae, I think I read somewhere, is offered as a challenge to the male writers who dwell in the banal. I’m thinking about my scathing review of John Updike’s Terrorist, wherein pages are spent on him fat shaming a woman trying to pick up the remote control from the floor. Cusk dwells in similar minutiae, though not nearly as abrasively and in a much more philosophical register. I can get behind the philosophy of elevating the everyday (it doesn’t all have to be grand narratives and epic quests!), but even so The Bradshaw Variations felt a little thin.

The central premise is that Tonie Swann takes on the English headship at her school and the increased demands of her job mean that Thomas, her husband, has to stay home and care for their young daughter. Cusk explores the ways that such a change can impact family dynamics. One of my favourite scenes in the text is when Tonie corrects Thomas when he talks about their daughter’s friend’s mother. When he has a more extended conversation with her, he notices all the details that Tonie got slightly wrong and has that little bit of relish at his vindication.

In fact, the characters in the book are all pretty petty. In another scene, there is an older couple who tend to a garden. The man is out working and the woman is out somewhere, long after she’d promised to return home. The man gets increasingly annoyed and then engages in self-denial as his revenge. When the woman returns and finds he never had his tea and biscuits, he tells her, “You said you’d be here. It seemed sensible to wait” (43). In fact, the narration tells us, “He is parched, and when he straightens up from stooping over the gravel he is slightly dizzy. She stands there with flushed cheeks, her mouth drooping at the corners. Sometimes he forgets that he and she are old, and then the sight of her reminds him” (43). When she insists on making the tea, he refuses: “I don’t want it now. I don’t like to have tea later than four. It spoils my supper” (43). They engage in a back-and-forth where she offers and her refuses and so on and so on. In the pettiness of the moment there’s a philosophical introspection:

He bends down again with his trowel. He can see her feet beside him on the gravel path, the ropes of blue veins, the calloused toes bunched in her sandals. He wonders what she will do. The air between them seems to tremble; the atmosphere is a dark bud straining to burst into flower. He wants its offering, of love or violence. He wants to be located in the maze of his own rigidity and offered something. That is the test, as it has always been. (43).

The image of a “dark bud straining to burst into flower” seems a perfect symbol for the moment. The ambiguity of “love or violence” being at the core of the bloom also encapsulates the tension of the moment and when she continues questioning him about why he didn’t have tea, “He does not reply. This is not what she ought to have said. It leaves him in the maze; it asks him to find his own way out” (43). I think it’s a great reflection of the way we hold certain expectations of others and how those expectations trap us to our own detriment. When the woman decides to have tea on her own,

He hears her crunch away. She is gone. He feels presence of a terrible void, advancing on him, coldly enveloping him. It is silence: Gus has turned his mower off. Later he hears her return through the dusk to where he still bends over the gravel, weeding. She places a cup of tea at his feet with two bourbon biscuits in the saucer, and then swiftly she is gone again. The biscuits are his favourite kind. He watches them out of the corner of his eye as he works; he meditates on them darkly. They have, he decides, been spoilt. He has been separated forever from their sweetness. He lets the tea go cold. When it grows dark he returns to the house and pours it down the sink, and places the biscuits back in their tin. (43-44).

I really like that moment. To me, it works as a standalone scene or a short story. It’s a scene that clearly expresses a particular kind of petty drama and the tensions of self-interest and relationship-building. It’s also a way of making use of the plethora of characters in the book in a way that feels self-contained and authentic.

One of my issues with the book is that I don’t really care about anybody other than the two main characters, and even then somewhat minimally. Thomas’ extended family is introduced; parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, and so on. Mostly, I had a hard time distinguishing who was who—they all get introduced essentially at once and there were very few actual events to build an understanding of their lives. I think part of the point of the book, actually, is that none of the characters are particularly likeable. Tonie comes across as cold and superior, with the added insult of having an affair that is never addressed. From a plot perspective, the awful secrets of the book don’t seem to matter much. The fact that there is a secret is the point itself. 

I’m not giving up on Cusk by any means—her more recent work has been some of the most captivating work I’ve read lately—but I will say, The Bradshaw Variations just didn’t “hit the same.”

Nonetheless, happy reading!