Book Review: On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)

From On the Calculation of Volume (Book I), by Solvej Balle:

Amazon

"My name is Tara Selter. I am sitting in the back room overlooking the garden and a woodpile. It is the eighteenth of November. Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room 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."

---

Grade: B-

Book Review: "On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)", by Solvej Balle

Like the Bill Murray movie "Groundhog Day", the protaganist of this story is a woman caught in an infinite time loop. One day, November 18th, for no apparent reason, she went to sleep and woke up the next morning on November 18th again. She does this day after day. She remembers clearly what happened on each of her previous November 18ths, but everyone else forgets, not being in the time loop themselves and so have no November 18th in their own time lines to remember. Her memory accumulates more and more events from her string of November 18ths. For everyone else, November 18th is always a brand new day.

The novel is the first of an expected seven other novels in the series. Six have already been published in Danish and three translated to English. The focus of of the first is on Tara Selter coming to an awareness of the dilemma she's caught in, the "rules" for how her new world operates, and what happens day after day as she tries to break the loop.

What causes the loop? Some weird physics? Extraterrestrials? Is it simply mental illness on her part? Solvej Balle is less interested in that angle to the story. The most important thing for her is really what the experience does to Tara Selter mentally and emotionally. Even though there's no arc to her timeline, there is an arc to the story of her mental state, one that will eventually lead to madness or enlightenment. Or something else entirely. It's worth getting caught in the loop yourself and go along for the ride for at least one novel, but I'll be hopping off before Volume II.