Ever Feel Like You Were Trapped in the Same Day?

What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn’t? What would we do?

Ask Tara Selter. The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle’s miraculous septology, On the Calculation of Volume, has been trapped in the same day with no end in sight. Tara is a rare-books seller living on the outskirts of Clairon-sous-Bois in northern France, where she enjoys a cozy and otherwise unremarkable existence. On November 17, she traveled to Bordeaux for an auction of 18th-century illustrated books, then went on to Paris, where she spent the next day browsing antiques. Time appeared to proceed normally — until she saw repeat newspaper headlines and a slice of hotel bread descending in the same airy manner as before. No matter what, it’s November 18. So she settles into this peculiar nook of time, feeling its corners and turning over its furniture.

On the Calculation of Volume is a literary phenomenon nearly 40 years in the making. It’s a speculative masterwork and the long-awaited comeback of a now-62-year-old writer whose breakthrough, the 1993 short-story collection According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind, made her an international sensation. She conceived of On the Calculation’s concept in 1987, then started writing in 1999, a strenuous process prolonged by self-sabotage and studies of ancient Greek. “I cannot fathom how anyone can write a book every year, or even every second year,” she said in a 2016 profile in the Danish paper Politiken. (She is supported by a lifelong grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.) She now resides on the small island Ærø, where she runs her own publishing house with her son and torments herself by writing. Balle still hasn’t finished all of this novel; the first five volumes have been released in Denmark, and she’s at work on the sixth.

Leave it to a Nordic writer to shake up the international literary sphere with a multi-part experimental epic. Volumes one to three became word-of-mouth sensations in Denmark, winning Scandinavia’s premiere literary prize in 2022. The English version was the subject of an intense bidding war, and rights have been sold to 25 territories. Karl Ove Knausgård called it “absolutely, utterly incredible”; Rachel Cusk, who was sent a preview copy, sung its praises earlier this year at a Harper’s panel with Ben Lerner. The first two volumes, translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland, are out November 26. Book one has already been longlisted for the National Book Award in Translated Literature.

These initial volumes are deceptively unassuming and compact at under 200 pages each, distilling the peculiarity of being into its most concentrated essence. Balle, who has long been fascinated by the inscrutability of the human condition, makes ample use of a metaphysical premise that could easily wear thin, one already examined in popular media like Groundhog Day and Russian Doll. But the subject of the novel isn’t really Tara. It’s the vast particularities of the world observed at multiple scales. “Our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences,” Tara notes in one of those “We’re all meat sacks on a floating rock” revelations, balanced here by Balle’s keen attention to the everyday minutiae we take for granted.

We first meet our tragic heroine on her 121st November 18. She is hiding in the back room of her stone cottage listening to the routine patter of a man upstairs. That man is her husband and business partner, Thomas, with whom she shares a love that fizzes “at the atomic level,” so close as to be molecularly bound. In his mind, she’s still away in Paris on business. She has explained her situation many times, but his memory is always wiped clean. So the lovers are separated by an invisible chasm, their wholeness eroding as if it’s a geological inevitability.

The book is a kind of elegy. We witness the slow-motion demise of a relationship in which no one is to blame, just time. The problem is not that Thomas doesn’t believe Tara — he does, again and again, with the shared experience of trying to understand as its own unifying pleasure. The pair read about variable chronometry and parallel universes. They dizzy themselves with interpretations, locked in a “clumsy knowledge polka, a wonderment waltz, a blithe ballet of discovery.” They find inconsistencies. At the end of the day, they simply can’t explain why this keeps happening to her. Eventually, the labor of catching Thomas up to speed becomes too cumbersome, and the pair grow helpless against the days that come between them. Tara sets out on her own. She settles in the back room as a fugitive, imagining Thomas’s hubbub as a symphony meant for her. From there, she grieves: “It is the loss that staggers me.”

Book one wonders: How can two people continue loving each other with the future foreclosed? But is it possible to guarantee anything, or must we accept, as Tara begins to acknowledge, that the “constancy of the world” is “on shaky ground” — that all we know can be gone in an instant? More than others, her life hinges on a kind of object permanence. She and Thomas live in a house inherited from his grandfather, which has remained virtually the same since his childhood. They trade in historical mundanities — antiquated books on potable water, for example — that survived travel through centuries intact and have become contemporary fetish objects. Now, things disappear with no rhyme or reason. She keeps items close while sleeping to see if they stay.

On the Calculation of Volume is also a commemoration of a disappearing world. Tara misses her husband, but she misses the other periods of the year as well, all the tiny elements that orchestrate a season: the dry creak of the staircase in summer, before “moisture seeps back into the wood and autumn sets in with its breezes and silent stairs.” Tara’s sensuous, attentive relationship to her surroundings may feel like a novelty, especially to American readers accustomed to temperature-controlled buildings and almost frictionless access to everything. On the Calculation opens the door to drizzly skies, smoky breezes, and wet garden soil. Mentions of digital devices are few and far between; she visits an electronics store but to buy a telescope. Even the books Tara acquires she evaluates not by content but feel, “like an inchworm testing whether a leaf is worth creeping across.”

In book two, she travels across Europe in search of the seasons, finding silent snowscapes in Norway, baby lambs in Cornwall, sun and dancing near a beach in Montpellier. Seasons, according to a meteorologist who aids in her quest, are psychological phenomena: “memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experience and feelings, perhaps.” They are vanishing, both as tangible realities and mental ones. Her journey exposes all the ways we already defy natural time — importing produce from other hemispheres or warming the climate with our frantic churn of activity. Tara’s consumption is a problem. Whatever she eats will not replenish itself; she empties aisles, removes leeks from the ground, pillages and spreads out like a colonizer. “I am living in a time that eats up the world,” she mourns. So are we.

Not all is lost. While the physical world dwindles, her mental landscape flourishes. A mass of passing detail — colors, people, everything — has accumulated in her memory from a year of November 18ths. “I glided through it all with unaccustomed ease and found myself thinking how strange it was that one could float so lightly through such a compact world,” she says. She picks up new language fragments and uncanny sensations. She records it all on paper to verify that she exists but also to eventually locate a way to escape. What we read is a record of her noticing. She will continue writing it, one year of November 18ths after the next, still stuck but never static.