“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. IV” by Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

This fourth volume by Balle continues with Tara Selter being stuck in the eighteenth of November. But now she is very much not alone. At their villa in Bremen, those who met there eventually settled into a routine of formal meetings where various topics would be submitted and then debated, “This morning there were twenty-nine of us around the table. We had got hold of more chairs, and the rest of us perched on the sills of the bay windows overlooking the garden, in the gray light from the sky. There was no end to the possible topics of discussion, no end to the suggestions for our decision-making procedures and agendas, no end to the digressions and additions and ideas that branched out in all directions…. It turned into a meeting about the names of things, about the words for the peculiarities of the eighteenth of November, about the chances of ever finding terms that truly fit, about precision and the spaciousness of language.”

Tara continued with her explanation,“Someone proposed we name the world we came from—the life we had lived before the eighteenth, TOL, for example, The Other Life. Gita suggested DAL, Das andere Leben, but Henry didn't like that…. One of the Val Benoît residents suggested that we call time before the eighteenth La Vie Avant and the time after La Vie Maintenant; that way we could talk about LaViA and LaViM. This led us back to the difference between acronyms and syllabic abbreviations, until Gita's group pointed out that we also needed to address time after the eighteenth, La Vie Après, but that too would be LaViA, introducing unnecessary confusion—unless, of course, we could expect these two to be the same: that the world we return to after our life in the eighteenth would be exactly as before. Then they could share a name…. There are those who refer to us as loopers and the others as noopers, and some speak of repeaters or returners, but that raises the question: Who are the repeaters really? Isn't the difference simply that we know we are repeating the eighteenth while the others believe everything is normal? But we see them going about their business, again and again. So who is the repetition?"

Finally, the group decided it would put on a special conference with the aim of making a more systematic exploration of their situation, “Many pointed out that our explorations lacked a theoretical foundation, that attempting to build hypotheses or explanations would be futile without a thorough understanding of past theories of time—from the pre-Socratic period to the twenty-first century. Should our foundation not be in place before we start indulging in fantasies? Others, however, believed it was precisely the temporal theories of the past that had fallen short, that the prevailing conception of time itself was fundamentally flawed.”

“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. III” by Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

This third volume of Balle’s novel departs from the first two installments in that Tara discovers that she is not alone. “In the eighteenth of November, people follow patterns, and as long as you don’t draw them out of their established routines, they will stay in their allotted places. They don’t walk down the steps one day and up the steps the next…. As the man in the green shirt was going up the steps, now wearing blue, it began to dawn on me that I might not be the only one at odds with the eighteenth of November.” She meets Henry Dale and they trade stories and commiserate. “I have met someone who remembers. This sentence has been buzzing around in my head since this morning, and now I am typing it here…. Now there are two of us. Two of a kind: remembering, trapped in the eighteenth of November and no longer alone.”

Eventually, Henry moves in with Tara and they discuss how they have been spending their eighteenth of Novembers, “He says he understands my interest in the Romans. That it’s no surprise the Romans brought us together—with a bit of help from coincidence, of course. We had both landed on the banks of the Rhine, at the border of the Roman Empire. We had both lost the futures which once stretched out before us: the nineteenth

and the twentieth and all the weeks and months we had imagined lay in store, but little by little had been erased. It’s hardly surprising that one turns to the past…. Henry believed that anyone paying attention to the world around them would inevitably become interested in the Romans—or at least in the fall of the Roman Empire…. When you inhabit the same day for so long, you start to see all the cracks. There’s nowhere to hide anymore. We have come to a standstill in a time that is starting to crumble. Europe in freefall. The final days of the West. It’s no wonder one feels compelled to

follow in the Romans’ footsteps. One wants to know what led them to their downfall…. We were bidding farewell to the Western world. Goodbye, aufWiedersehen, ciao, adieu. Buona sera, Evening Lands…. I had never been interested in the mechanics of history, in patterns and progress and necessity, periods and waves, glory and decline. I had been interested in

what brought the Romans to a halt…. It had always been about the things, I said. The objects. The material. I was interested in what existed. What had been carried through the centuries.”

At the end of this volume, Tara and Henry discover that it is not just the two of them who are stuck in the eighteenth of November. At first, they meet Olga Periti and Ralf Kern. “We’ve held a meeting about our future and where we should live. We are sticking to the agreement that we meet every hundred days. That we belong together. We have had a meeting about belonging together, and we do. We belong together when we agree and when we no longer agree…. Now we are searching for a place to live. We’ve looked at apartments in the city and houses on the outskirts. It isn’t easy, as we are four people who need to reach an agreement. Four people in the eighteenth of November. Who knows if there are others? Maybe we are five, or eight, or sixteen. Maybe even more. People who wake up every morning to the eighteenth of November. It’s not difficult to imagine. Not anymore…. Ralf has calculated the probability of there being others, and the odds are greater than you’d think. If there are only four of us, it’s a miracle that we managed to find each other…. And then suddenly there they were. Yesterday. As in, five people at the gate. They had parked their car, climbed out and buzzed the intercom…. This was an insistent noise, and the eighteenth of November doesn’t have any insistent noise from the buzzer at our gate. And yet it did.”

“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. II” by Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara Haveland)

This novel continues the themes of Balle’s previous volume, heavy on pondering the philosophy of time and of self. The conceit of Tara repeating the day of November 18 again and again despite where she wanders in the world continues. “Time passes, but all it does is pour day after day into my world, it goes nowhere, it has no stops or stations, only this endless chain of days…. I feel out of sorts, superfluous, bedraggled, wrong. I am no longer Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller with an eye for detail and an instinct for collectable works. I am not Tara Selter at work. I am not a buyer for a company by the name of T. & T. Selter. She is no more…. It is the Tara Selter with a future who is gone. It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.”

Time, the lack of change, and the lack of seasons begins to take its toll on her psyche. “Maybe I should just go over to the enemy. Maybe I ought to just live with the world as it is and accept that there will never be an Oktoberfest, that there are no longer any festivals, no Christmas, no New Year, and that I will never again see winter or spring, no Easter, no summer. Only November and November. In any case, I’m not in the mood for festivities.” The quirks of her world confuse her. “The eighteenth of November is a loose world, I know, it is impossible to get a firm grip on it. It contains phones that stop working, empty memory sticks, passwords that have to be keyed in again and again, searches that disappear overnight. Each morning everything is gone and the eighteenth of November wakes up fresh and unused again.” But she survives and makes a new life for herself, the best life she can think to create. “That is how my days are spent. One after another, I wake up and roam around history. I can feel my brain growing. It grows through remembering and it grows through all the things I find. It grows through forgetting, it lets go, it leaves spaces to stand empty and the next day I search for new knowledge to fill the empty spaces.”

“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. I” by Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara Haveland)

This is the first novel in a seven volume collection by Balle. The conceit, in a nutshell, is simple, “He is waiting for me. 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.”

Tara’s husband, Thomas, is not living through whatever it is that she is. “We were living in two different times. That was all. Two times that had flooded their banks. At a place where rivers meet and converge, a kind of temporal Mesopotamia where the Euphrates and the Tigris are merely two different names for water. We were doing fine in Mesopotamia.” But, inevitably, the day(s) start to wear on Selter’s psyche. “76 days was too many. The distance was too great. I stood in the kitchen with the notebook in my hand and knew that too many days had come between us…. I couldn’t carry on with our repetitions. The fog had lifted, the landscape stretched out clear and sharp before me and we were not waking to the same day.” Still, life, for both husband and wife, moves along, of sorts. “The distance is shortest at night. When Thomas is asleep there is only the ceiling between us, a thin line between two forms of time. I sit in a room that holds the world open and keeps the distance between us as short as possible. He calls the ceiling the floor. I call the floor the ceiling. But these are just words, not a distance but a line that keeps us connected.”