“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.”