A high concept is an irresistible temptation for a writer: it encapsulates a book in one phrase and entices the reader with a single strong idea. Typically it asks “What if?”. What if women could electrocute men, asks Naomi Alderman’s The Power. What if Germany had won the second world war (and within that world, someone wrote a high-concept novel where Germany lost), asks Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.
The first two volumes of Danish writer Solvej Balle’s projected seven-novel sequence On the Calculation of Volume — the first five books have been published in Denmark — have an equally ticklish premise: what if someone had to live the same day over and over? The idea of a time loop is not new in modern literature — Kate Atkinson did it in Life After Life — but the predecessor that most will think of is the 1993 film Groundhog Day, where a man experiences the same day repeatedly. (Playing her own trick with time, Balle has been quick to insist in interviews that she first thought of the idea in 1987, six years before the movie was released.)
The first volume, for which Bolle and translator Barbara J Haveland have been longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize, covers a year in the life of antiquarian book dealer Tara Selter. Or a day in the life, which is the same thing, really. “It is the eighteenth of November,” she tells us. “I have got used to that thought.”
Every day Tara, who lives in the fictional town of Clairon-sous-Bois in northern France, wakes up and finds that it’s the 18th of November again — yet nobody else experiences this repetition. Over the weeks and months she becomes used to seeing the same things happening at the same time every day. Much of the first volume is taken up with testing the premise. Initially, Tara tells her husband what is happening and proves it to him by predicting the time of a rain shower or a neighbour walking past their home — but the next day, which for him is always his first 18th of November, he needs to be told again.
Eventually, Tara retreats to her own room, so as not to alarm her husband, and learns the rules of her world. She can move freely, so doesn’t have to wake up in the same place every day. If her husband plucks a leek from the garden, it will return the following morning, as the 18th of November renews itself; but if Tara takes it, it will still be gone the next day. Her body continues to move through time: a burn on her hand slowly heals, and she still needs to clip her nails, “snipping tiny slivers of time into the sink”.
At first Tara feels despair — “the eighteenth of November had rendered me peculiar. I wanted out” — then she begins to find opportunities. Of course, the reader is stuck in a loop of repetition with her, and the ways she exploits her predicament are not hard to foresee. Why doesn’t she try staying awake all night, we think — and she does . . . but it doesn’t make any difference. And why doesn’t she stave off boredom by travelling, so that she will no longer face the same thing every day? — and she does that too.
Tara figures that if she can fake a calendar year, by moving around Europe to where the weather feels summery or wintry, she will no longer feel stuck. But even as she isolates herself in a season of her own making, she pulls herself further away from connections with other people. (And, this being a serious work of literature, she doesn’t think about playing the lottery or betting on the horses.)
Balle is something of a literary enigma, who — in the words of her publisher — “rose to fame in the 1990s but then disappeared for almost 30 years”; and only one of her earlier books has appeared in English. Haveland’s translation of On the Calculation of Volume reads smoothly, with a spare, neutral tone that fits itself to the variety of emotions Tara goes through: alarm, boredom, hope.
By the end of volume two we are just over a quarter of the way through Balle’s projected sequence, so there’s the sense of a writer exploring the implications of her idea in real time — of Balle limiting what can happen in the story in order to discover what it is possible to say. But such a high concept can be a trap as well as a liberation. What if the writer runs out of ideas? There are hints of this happening in volume two, with sequences — family memories, the theft of a bag — which don’t connect much with the central premise, even where they provide a little welcome narrative push.
In the same way that Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go used an extreme example to highlight the limitations on all our lives, On the Calculation of Volume makes us think about our own experiences of time, how so often we repeat our days on autopilot, without reflection — without truly experiencing them. The first volume is exciting, intriguing and filled with novelty; the second volume less so. Will readers stay with this epic journey for the long haul? Perhaps: the end of volume two hints at a whole new direction for Tara’s story. Such variety may cheat the rules of that high concept, but it’s essential if the series is to remain enticing. The risk otherwise, in a series where the individual volumes don’t so much end as just stop, is that the reader will stop too.
On the Calculation of Volume, Books I and II by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland Faber & Faber £12.99 each/New Directions $15.95 each, 192 pages (vol I)/208 pages (vol II)
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