Before Tara Selter, the protagonist of Danish writer Solvay Balle's Volume Calculation series, is trapped in a time loop, she is one half of a squad called T. and T. Selter. It's a joint family and business venture in the fictional village of Clairons-sous-Bois, France: an antiquarian bookshop that Tara runs with her husband Thomas, who shares her devotion to material history and her talent for noticing. “Maybe we are a weather system,” Tara says. “We look at each other, touch each other, condense.”
Their couple is torn apart when Tara, in Paris for an auction, wakes up on the morning of November 19th with a flicker of déjà vu: the newspaper headlines seem familiar; At breakfast, the same hotel guest throws the same piece of bread. Horrified, Tara soon realizes that she is living in a repeating November 18th, while Thomas and the rest of the world continue to live without her.
The story, unfolding in subtle, strange parts, becomes, among other things, a parable about marital loneliness. Balle's time loop operates according to incomprehensible rules: although Tara's day is renewed, her body continues to age, and her geographical location may change. Some items she acquires, such as a toothbrush, stay with her, while others disappear overnight. When Tara first returns home to Clairon, she and Thomas orbit each other in their country cottage, and she watches him with keen tenderness, listening to his gentle tapping on the floorboards. Some days, Tara tells her husband about her predicament; other times she follows him like a shadow. The strategy she chooses doesn't matter. Every morning his memory is reset.
Balle's series has become a cult hit both in Scandinavia, where the first five of a planned seven books were released in the original Danish, and, most recently, in the US, where New Directions published English translations of books one through three. (Barbara Haveland narrated the first two; Sophia Hersey Smith and Jennifer Russell will release the third this month.) The novels, drawn from Tara's diary entries, combine metaphysical exploration with a deep attention to the natural and domestic worlds. Balle's prose—repetitive, hypnotic and poised like a small airplane—maintains an atmosphere of illuminated mundanity. Here is “the box opens, wood slides on wood.” There the light rain turns into rain, “pours from a bucket.” The effect of the time-loop device is propulsive yet lulling: the premise captures us with its tricks and then amplifies the movements and textures we already know.
Under the magnifying lens of Balle's vanity, marriage appears hyperreal, peaceful but doomed in a cycle of pleasant dinners, purposeful silences, and domestic routines that gradually fall out of whack. For Tara, Thomas comes down to the sounds he makes while carrying a cup of tea up and down the stairs. On day three hundred and thirty-nine, when Tara begs him to join her on a trip to Paris, the familiar impasse becomes startlingly literal: “He didn't want to come with me. He wanted to stay in his pattern.” In the end, despite their best efforts (the couple touchingly tries to merge their timelines during long sleepless nights together), Tara leaves her home and her husband. “Too many days have passed between us,” she says.
A stream of grief and longing runs through the series. Doomed to eternal autumn, Tara looks at a tree in her garden and sees only absence: “the absence of winter branches covered with frost, the absence of spring flowers, the absence of green leaves.” She swears she can hear other seasons “sighing through the cracks” of her November 18 repetition. If the show's conceit literally reflects the inconsistencies in our intimate relationships, it also dramatizes a man struggling with his finitude. Like all of us, Tara has a limited window for accumulating sensations and participating in the events of the world. Death, in the form of the nineteenth, presses against her timeline, simultaneously pursuing and evading her. She sits on the cusp of a future she knows she won't see.
Entering a time loop, Tara restlessly goes through phases and reactions, trying to decide how to use the days. First she puts herself and Thomas into a sweet slumber—“we made the horizon disappear,” she writes—and then she yearns for clarity by making tables and charts. She can't decide whether to keep a diary. On the one hundred and eighty-fifth day, she believes that “sentences are not needed.” On the one hundred and eighty-sixth day she comes back: “But if there is no need for sentences, why do I sit down at the table and write?” Her life becomes periodized: she spends periods in Bremen and Düsseldorf. The antique coin she bought for Thomas on November 18 becomes a talisman, disappearing from the timeline and then reappearing.
