The narrator of the Danish writer Solvej Balle’s seven-volume speculative epic is a rare book dealer trapped in a rare predicament — at least for a character in literary fiction. “It is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November. I no longer expect to wake up to the nineteenth of November and I no longer remember the seventeenth of November as if it were yesterday,” she says.
It’s literary Groundhog Day or, as one critic put it, in reference to the classic 1993 Bill Murray time-loop comedy, Groundhog Day as written by Samuel Beckett. Time has “fallen apart” and Tara Selter, our half English, half Belgian antiquarian book dealer heroine, is living in “an existential red alert … a quiet state of panic”.
The first volume of Balle’s enigmatic heptalogy — longlisted for the International Booker Prize and a word-of-mouth sensation in Denmark — is set over the course of a year. When the book opens, Tara is about to embark on a diary of her experience, having already lived through 121 consecutive November 18s. The “calendar error” began when she was on a trip to Paris to buy some 18th-century books for a client. She travelled back to her home in northern France to explain the temporal catastrophe to her husband, Thomas, who never doubts the story that she must remind him of every damp, grey morning. Still, there’s a hint of reproach on his face “as if it was not time, but me, that was failing him and throwing his world out of kilter”.
Despite describing her project as “just another time loop story”, Balle shows little intention of succumbing to the conventions of the device such as the protagonist escaping their time trap by means of self-improvement. Murray’s grumpy news anchor did, after all, find a way out of Groundhog Day once he had learnt a little human compassion.
The inspiration for the film was William Dean Howells’s 1892 short story Christmas Every Day, although it also brings to mind Sisyphus’s endless boulder push and Nietzsche’s ideas about eternal recurrence. The enduring appeal of the conceit, which lends itself to any genre and tone, is that it allows the protagonist’s personal growth to be at odds with the stasis of the world round them. But here, foreknowledge doesn’t help Tara to game her existence. The more she repeats her life, the more estranged she becomes from it.
Readers in Denmark, where five of the projected seven books have already been published, will have a clearer idea of Balle’s philosophical destination. Must we imagine Sisyphus to be happy, as Albert Camus proposed? Or would a sempiternal — an eternal, unchanging — life ultimately lack any purpose? The two volumes translated into English so far are more preoccupied with matters of volume — how much space we take up in the world.
The time rift presents intriguing inconsistencies. Tara discovers that some objects endure across the temporal fault: her notebook, her house keys, rare books. Significantly, however, the shops don’t replenish their stocks as the days turn. As she gradually empties their aisles, she becomes obsessed with her consumption, seeing herself as a “ravening monster” who is “living in a time that eats up the world”. How long can this finite world support her, she wonders.
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In the second book, Tara attempts to cope with the “maelstrom of repetitions” by artificially imposing seasons on her days. With the help of a meteorologist, she abandons her “chronic” November with Thomas and travels across Europe to capture the fleeting feeling of winter, spring and summer.
By this point, her need for variety and vibrancy is a relief. One of the frustrations of this ambitious, unusual project is that it is so slow and schematic that your impatient thoughts as a reader always outpace the action. Why, I kept wondering, is Tara not testing the time-loop scenario more urgently? It takes an inordinately long time for her to attempt to stay up all night to work out the exact moment the day resets. Realism may not be Balle’s intention, but it feels odd that Tara doesn’t seek the company of anyone other than Thomas for the initial 365 days of her endless autumn. I wanted her to be more playful with her predicament and more terrified by it.
Balle instead offers a more oblique investigation of time and the condition of being alive. Ultimately, this is a story of how we must live with our own powerlessness. I applaud the ambition — but I’d be surprised if many readers feel inclined to relive the repetitions over seven whole volumes.
On the Calculation of Volume I & II by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber £12.99 pp177 & pp204). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
