On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes I & II review: 'rewrites the rules of the novel'

Danish author Solvej Balle has had the first two volumes of On The Calculation Of Volume published, with two more to come (Picture: Antti Aimo-Koivisto/Lehtikuva/AFP via Getty)

Although it has been my privilege to review a great many excellent, memorable, fascinating and moving books, it is rare to be gifted a work such as this; a novel which rewrites the rules of the novel. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, On The Calculation Of Volume expands the possibility of fiction. My only caveat is that at present we have the first two volumes, with three and four being published later this year, five available in the original Danish and the series expected to conclude in seven volumes. I can only hope, and have no reason to doubt, that it will continue and conclude with equal intelligence and daring. Even if it does end up like A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu or The Man Without Qualities or The Pale King, it is still a phenomenal achievement. The opening is stark, eerie and deceptively simple: “There is someone in the house”. You would be forgiven for thinking this refers to Thomas Selter, whom the narrator hears filling the kettle, opening the fridge, pacing around. But the chapter heading – “#121” – gives us pause. The interloper, the surprising presence is the narrator, who reveals herself as Tara Selter, Thomas’s wife. He is oblivious and she is hiding, because she has become stuck in the 18th of November; and has been for 121 days. Each day resets for her, and everyone behaves just as they did: whatever she spends, for example, her bank account returns to the original balance the next day. Since what Thomas did and will do is fixed, she decided on day #108 to hide in the interstices and gaps in his life. As she puts it on day #223, “I have discovered something uncanny. Or at least, it’s not something I have discovered, because I already knew it, but I have discovered that it is uncanny. It’s a problem I cannot solve. There are ghosts and monsters. Thomas is the ghost and I am the monster”. It is just one of the smart decisions to begin in media res of an endless cycle. Tara describes the first repeated day, and it is small moments of déjà vu that alert her to her predicament – a mundane bread roll falling is the first hint. She is a free radical in a deterministic world. Unlike most novels where reality goes out of kilter, Tara does the sensible thing. She and Thomas try to solve what has happened, even though each new day he will not remember their previous hypotheses and experiments. “We debated perceptions of reality and mental dysfunction, we considered whether I might be generating trains of fictional experience or whether everyone else had been struck by some form of amnesia… we read about parataxic views of time and variable chronometry, we unearthed descriptions of fractures in time and chronotoxic recurrence”. It is utter exasperation that makes Tara secrete herself in Thomas’s routine. She has learned that there are minor variations – her hair still grows, wounds heal, a leek taken from the garden does not revert for some reason. Bizarre though this is, in a way it is just like life only more so. As she says: “every system fell apart the minute we tried to put all our data together to form a whole”. Or her revelation that “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 improbably coincidences”. Balle manages, astonishingly, to generate plot in repetition. After acquainting herself with the premise, its rules and exceptions, Tara looks for a way to break the cycle – “there must be difference to grab hold of. There must be a variation. A change. But what does a difference look like?” She wonders whether the “door” into the 19th should be knocked down or knocked on softly. The first volume ends with the anniversary as a potential unlocking, if repeated within the repetition, ending; “I go with the day. I flow with it, wherever it may go. I let myself be carried along by the current. Now I swim. Dive.” Volume II crashes with bathos: “#368. What had I imagined? Time as a merry-go-round one could jump on and off? The year as a stream running underneath my eighteenth of November?” In Volume II, Tara tries to recreate the seasonal year, travelling to find frost and warmth, spring and harvest inside the single day. It ends with an almighty cliffhanger: there might be someone else in her day. There are parallels. Tom McCarthy’s Remainder was about an attempt to recreate a specific day; The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares has the idea of inserting oneself into the “film” of others’ repeated lives. There is a resemblance to the hyper-real minutiae of Knausgaard’s autofictions (although this is actually inventive and not merely indulgent). Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries and Jon Fosse’s Septology are similar “maximalist miniatures”. But Balle’s achievement is singularly her own. The amount of love, loneliness, loss, bemusement, wonder, morality and aching is glorious. This is the meticulous raised to the level of the miraculous.

On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes I & II, by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland, Faber & Faber, both £12.99