How We Get Our Bearings

#121

From the very beginning of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, there is something wrong with time. We sit with a narrator somewhere in a house, as another person moves about the space. The narrator is listening, for the gush of water through pipes, the whoosh of a gas burner as it ignites, the rustling of a spoon in a bag of tea, footsteps, opening and closing doors. She knows these events already, in sequence, predicting some (‘in a moment I’ll hear the chink of a cup being taken from the cupboard’) and noting others that are inaudible but that she nonetheless knows are there (‘I don’t hear the sound of the tea being poured into the cup.’) It is a deliberately disorienting opening, one in which the gap between the narrator and the reader – in what each knows, and where and when each stands – is slowly opened out. 

Four months, give or take, have already elapsed – except that elapsed is exactly what they haven’t done. It is Day #121 since Tara Selter first ‘fell out’ of time – since she first started experiencing the eighteenth of November over and again, without progression, without a means of ‘escape’. The narrative conceit is simple, and Balle never gives an explanation as to how or why this has happened. The mechanics are beside the point. Because what Balle is really writing about is time. 

#146

‘I have not found a way out of the eighteenth of November, but I have found roads and paths through the day, narrow passages and tunnels I can move along. I cannot get out, but I can find ways in.’ 

I’ve not been able to confirm if Danish is among the European languages – like Spanish or Greek –that speak idiomatically of time as three-dimensional. Of time as possessing not just length or breadth – a short time, a long day – but also volume, so that a day is empty of, or full of, time. I love this idea of time as something capacious, capable of expanding or contracting like a balloon filled with breath. Of time not just as something that we move through, but that we are contained by or immersed in. That we inhabit. 

My conjecture about Danish is unlikely, a linguist friend tells me later. Two-dimensional, short-and-long time is a feature of most Germanic languages, and Danish falls into this category.  

Nonetheless, I think that this idea is central to Balle’s thinking, so often does Tara speak of moving around within her day, or plunging into it, so often does she refer to it as a kind of container. Time has to be the volume that she is, over and again, attempting to calculate. 

2022

Time is almost impossible to write about directly. I learnt this the hard way, by falling down a research rabbit hole, reading for months on end about time, how we experience and understand it, why it seems to speed up and slow down, how it is registered in the body and brain. I read about circadian rhythms, about differences in sensitivities, in linguistic conventions and metaphorical constructions of time, about psychological orientations towards time; I read evolutionary theories and abstract physics, which I’m still not sure I understand. I was fascinated – I still am – and as well as talking the ears off anyone who showed the slightest interest, I tried to write about what I had learned. 

And I failed. Time is so terribly abstract, even though we know it and feel it intimately, not to mention all the time. It is impossible to pin down by itself and in and of itself; it is unreal and inert without a context (perhaps because it is always the context, at once the background and the heartbeat of our stories and our lives). 

I keep thinking that Balle’s solution is to break time. Because Tara Selter has fallen out of linear time, she is free to think about it in its absence, and she is also forced to try to find new ways to orient herself, to find and make meaning without its regular progression – without history, memory, a future, change. 

2024, 2025, 2026

On the Calculation of Volume is a ‘planned septology’. So far, six of the books have been published in Danish, by Solvej Balle’s own press, with the first four volumes available in English translation.  Book Five is slated for release on the eighteenth of November this year, just as Books One and Three were released, in Anglophone territories, on the same date in 2024 and 2025 respectively. I can’t decide if this is cute or on the nose.  

#122

By the time we meet Tara Selter, she has become accustomed to her predicament, and to her isolation within it. She has been through speculation and hope, attempts to effect change, and is now trying to live within the constraints of a single, repeated day. She uses her knowledge of her partner Thomas’ movements through the house to move about unnoticed – Thomas believes her to be at a sales fair in Paris – and takes advantage of her precise knowledge of the day’s weather to walk in the nearby woods and village. All her confusion and disbelief, as well as all her speculation and experimentation, her failed attempts to break the loop, have already passed, and she has reached a stage where she is, if not quite resigned to her fate, then at least determined to find a way to live with it. She has learned that some material objects will remain with her for the next loop when she interacts with them, while others will return to their original state and location; that her bank balance resets overnight. Most importantly, she has realised that she cannot bring any other person into her disrupted time – that they all lose their memory of the day they have experienced alongside Tara – and so the days accrue for her alone. 

It is for this reason that Tara has begun to write: ‘because the paper remembers’. As she moves experientially further and further from her loved ones – for whom no time at all has passed – and from her regular world, the paper remembers. And Tara bears witness to her own and lonely self. 

On the Calculation of Volume takes the form of Tara’s journals, her first-person recounting of her ever-repeating days – the small moments she observes and conversations she overhears, her shifting moods and ideas. Above all else, Tara uses her journal to think through her situation, what it means to inhabit a single day repeatedly, the effects of her actions within it, how she might best live. The journal is chronological but not linear; and what’s most fascinating about the form is that it gives space to Tara’s changing thinking – it’s not uncommon that a series of three or four entries expounding a particular opinion or idea are followed by Tara’s dismissal of the chain of thought in favour of another. This is important: in a day that repeats, that is without change, Tara’s thinking is and has to be the one dynamic element. But there’s also something wonderfully refreshing – something that feels vital, lived – about Balle’s willingness to let Tara contradict herself and change her mind over and again. We see the process of Tara trying to understand of her world moment by moment, the intellectual work of it. And what we are given is a sense that anything she lands on exists within a multiplicity of meanings and ways to be, all of which are temporary and contingent. All of which, that is, are right for a time, but not all time. 

1983

This is not Groundhog Day. Solvej Balle has maintained (for whatever this is worth) that she had been planning these novels, centred on this one repeating day, for at least a decade before that film became associated with this conceit. Instead, Balle claims what she was thinking of was James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the way its sprawling narrative unfolds across a single day. That one day could be ‘so voluminous’ – that was the revelation; that one single day could contain so much and mean so much, could sprawl out in so many directions. The repetition of the eighteenth of November allows Tara – or forces her – to encounter more and more of the multitude that it contains. To attend more fully to its possibilities and its capacity.  

Tara is not trying to change her life. She is not being pushed to an epiphany or taught a lesson, nor being set a puzzle that she needs to solve. Her time loop is inexplicable, utterly opaque in its cause and inconsistent in its laws. The mechanism is unimportant, except that Tara has to find a way to live in its ever-recurring aftermath. 

2026

On the Calculation of Volume is voluminous. It feels remiss not to mention some of its features not contained within this review: Tara’s concern with ‘monstrous’ consumption and a fear of ‘eating the world’, that is, her growing awareness of her destructive footprint across her one repeated day. Tara’s months-long obsession with the Roman Empire, especially in its final years, and what it means to live at a time of collapse, the looming end of a civilisation. The family as ‘a solid core with friable edges’. Logistics. The sense of a mature pan-Europeanism, or at least, of a maturely unionised Europeanism. There are the wonderful character studies Balle draws, of the faintly ridiculous Ralf and the firebrand Olga, or of Tara and Thomas’ marriage, which is so tenderly portrayed. The importance of shared memory, of witnessing and being witnessed, and the sense of ease that this allows. What goes unrecorded in history but nonetheless persists. 

#298, #366

For much of the first volume, Tara’s efforts are centred on finding measured and metrical ways to understand time. Counting her days, of course, is the most obvious means of doing this, and it is something that she does from the very outset. Even without time’s progression, Tara needs to know how much time has passed.  

But there are other gestures towards calendrical time too. For a period of several weeks Tara becomes fascinated by the night sky, setting herself up on the back porch of her house with a telescope and a star chart after Thomas has gone to sleep, learning to identify the constellations, or simply gazing up into the dark. Astronomy is, of course, one of the earliest forms of human time-keeping, the changing positions of the stars directly linked to the year’s progression, the shifting phases of the moon still informing our conception of the month (both words derive from the same ancient root, which means ‘to measure’). And while Tara’s night sky, untethered to progressive time, cannot change or move, it is important that she looks there for a way to locate herself within this new kind of time. 

Later on, Tara becomes convinced that there is ‘an ordinary year’ somehow ‘running underneath [her] days’ and that a natural exit will, accordingly, offer itself at the end of a full year of repetitions. She can’t quite, yet, untether herself from the idea of a calendrical year and its structuring logic, can’t quite give up on being governed by something that has always felt like a natural law, even though its artifice has become obvious to her. Tara still sees the end of a full year as a milestone, and becomes increasingly fascinated with – and anxious about – it, retracing her steps from the original eighteenth of November, searching for differences and anomalies.  

#775, #793

And then Tara writes, ‘I have no calendar. 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.’ 

And Tara writes: 

2024

I read a short review that refers to these books as ‘hypnotic’. What the reviewer means, I think, is that each diary entry, each day, is short but so dense in its description, so steadfast in its rhythm, that each section reads like a prose poem. All the more so because Balle so often ends them with a distillation, a sentence or two so succinct and direct that it feels like an exhalation. 

So too, I keep thinking, there’s a quality to the books that is slippery. They are so full of subtle shifts, so elusive in their narrative drive that they are difficult to pin down. Or more precisely, that it is difficult to recognise exactly what is happening as it is happening, trapped as we are within the moment with Tara. They force a kind of attention.  

2026

Actually every review that I read refers to these books as ‘hypnotic’. 

#402

Tara’s desperate clinging to calendrical time cannot, of course, hold, and once she is forced to give this up she turns her attention instead to the seasons as a way of marking or tracking time. Seasonality is, of course, another way of accounting for time, less artificial than the strictures of the calendar and far more in tune with the natural world, less progressive and more cyclical – but it is an accounting nonetheless. It’s also a method more in keeping with Tara as a person –. she is a deeply philosophical thinker, but also someone keenly attuned to the sensuality of the world. Tara begins to ‘seek out’ different seasons within her eighteenth of November, moving across Europe by train. She travels north, through Sweden and Finland and Norway, finding a semblance of winter in snow and soup, a roaring fireplace, thick woollen socks and boots; then back through Denmark – where snow thaws on a roof – and into the English countryside, with its green fields, warm days, and occasional light frosts. For summer, she travels to the south of France, eating strawberries and asparagus and watching beachgoers from a café; for early autumn, to the yellow leaves and mild air of Cologne and Düsseldorf.  

In each of these places, she is especially alert to changes in the quality of light and the weather on her body; she collects words from various languages to describe seasonal details – duvets, pickled beetroot, chives. What she is building for herself she calls a ‘seasons machine,’ adding ‘if I am to have a future, I must have years, and if I am to have years, I must have seasons.’ Her time-keeping, that is, is less socially determined than calendrical systems, and much more in keeping with her needs. But it is every bit as vital: ‘Without seasons,’ Tara writes, ‘no time.’ 

2023, 2024, 2025, 2026…

The first flush of jasmine flowering on a wall, and then the first warm morning when its scent dominates the air, heavy and thick and, I always think, a benediction. The weeks when I sweep my courtyard free of leaves each day and fill the green bin in three. The first day it is warm enough to wear a T-shirt, to bare my arms to the sky, and then to swap socks and shoes for sandals. The first night that the dog tries to burrow under the bedclothes (excuse me, I say, but I do have some boundaries; her answering huff I’m sure is of disbelief). Moving my woollen overcoat from the wardrobe to the hook beside the front door, and returning it, months later. Jacarandas. Jonquils. Wattle in Sydney Park. All of these are anchors, of a sort. 

#1144, #1143

In the third book of On the Calculation of Volume, though, Balle turns her interest to social time, to considering, and reckoning with, time that is shared. Balle makes this shift by introducing a new character into Tara’s orbit and into her repeating day. This is Henry Dale, a Norwegian sociologist (who specialises, wonderfully, in identity ruptures), and his sudden presence means that she no longer needs to hold her world together on her own. 

There are two interesting temporal tensions that arrive alongside Henry. The first is a matter of accounting: Henry Dale has counted one more eighteenth of November than Tara – 1144 to her 1143 – and it’s clear to both of them that one of them has made an error in their tallying, and that there is no way of identifying who or how or when. That Tara is able to let go of her certainty – to ‘skip’ a day to balance her accounts with Henry’s – is perhaps her final shrugging off of calendrical time. The second is more profound, and it is experiential: within days, Henry moves into Tara’s flat, and the pair become inseperable, slowly settling into a gentle domesticity and a shared, ‘simple world.’ And with Henry in her world and in her home, Tara notices that time has sped up – that ‘the pace has quickened’ – and lost some of its friction, that she feels the days less heavily, less intensely. 

2021

This is a natural effect – for want of better terminology – of shared or social time. We feel it differently to, which is to say we feel it less than, time that’s spent alone. Perhaps this is simply because social time is less spacious – all of the little interstices of the day that we notice, in solitude, are inevitably filled when we are in company; though there is evidence, too, that the rhythms of our bodies, inextricably tied to our perception of time, adjust in response to those with whom we share our time and space. We may begin, that is, with separate understandings (#1143 and #1144) but these will reconcile and synchronise. 

At the very end of 2020, that strange rupture of a year, I moved in with my partner, a way of living I had never attempted before. While I’ve also never lived alone (too afraid of what this might mean for my still-precarious mental health), in the sharehouses I had inhabited, by then, for years, I was used to spending vast tracts of my day in solitude while my housemates were at work – and the changes to my sense of time, in this new, intensely joint environment, threw me for a loop. I couldn’t hold on to my days any more, couldn’t feel their passing hours; time had some new and slippery quality that was less under my grasp. It was unsettling in a fundamental, core-deep sense. In was in these circumstances that I first started reading about time, trying, I think, to research and to write my way out of this confusion. It was in these circumstances that I first lost my footing.

#1652, #1892

There is, of course, another interesting aspect to social and shared time – which is that despite the inevitably increasing synchronicity of our bodies, we all carry within us psychological ‘time perspectives’ that have been shaped by our individual experiences and are not so easily reconciled. The term belongs to the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who is interested in the different orientations towards the past, present and future that people display, the different beliefs and valence that we situate across them. Zimbardo argues that our ‘time perspectives’ have a profound effect on how we understand our lives and the world we inhabit, what we expect of them and the stories that we tell ourselves about them.  

It is clear that Balle has an interest in this too, albeit of a less formalised kind. Tara and Henry often talk about time – of course they do – in their rambling conversations and many of their disagreements come down to differences in just this kind of perspective. But when the pair are joined by two more time-stuck characters, Olga and Ralf, these differences become more apparent. In part, this is because the group, who decide to all move in together, regularly set aside time for ‘discussions’ of various issues, almost all of which, in one way or another, eventually and inevitably come around to time. 

Ralf, Tara writes, is ‘most interested in the events and critical incidents of the eighteenth’ –  an anxious orientation towards the present as a time of crisis and action; whereas Olga ‘envision[s] a radically different society, a newly minted future,’ a hopeful, impassioned orientation towards what is to come. Henry’s interest is in ‘those parts of the past which reflect a crumbling world’ – a pessimistic orientation towards the past. Tara, I think, is undecided. So many of her efforts have been attempts to find a way to live happily in an unmoored, eternal present, yet she cannot stop thinking of the past, or hoping for a different future. She is pragmatic, and she is patient – because she has had to be. 

#1845, #1878

Olga describes time ‘as tectonic plates sliding beneath each other, different layers’, and Tara replies that she sees it ‘more like the edges of lawns or like weeds, or hedges and flowerbeds and things that merge together and overshadow each other as they grow’. 

Henry thinks time is ‘more like a train, and we are all seated in the same compartment’, and Tara muses that it’s ‘more like a ship crossing rough seas’, in that they all have to learn new skills, ‘the different sails, the various ropes and intricate knots’, how to ‘scan the waters’ and ‘patch the hull’. 

Olga says it is ‘too dark and quiet’ for this metaphor, and that if time is a container, all four of them are ‘in a pocket’. 

#1895

In Volume Four, Balle’s interest moves from the social to the societal – a difference that is, at its foundation, one of scale, despite the societal being far more wide-ranging in its implications and effects. In a narrative sense, this means that Tara and her friends, after a few months ensconced in their house on the outskirts of Bremen, are interrupted by five strangers arriving on their doorstep – the beginning of a steady stream of new arrivals, all of whom are marooned within the eighteenth of November. This strange community has to find a way to coexist, co-operate and regulate itself – and key to any kind of organisation or cooperation at the societal level is a shared understanding of time. Without this, it is impossible to coordinate all the community’s necessities for day-to-day living – gathering food, cutting firewood, disposing of garbage, maintenance and shared chores. 

Societal time, that is to say, is too large and complex to be negotiated in and by our bodies, by small adjustments of rhythm that bring us into sync within the purely social. It is at the level of the societal that time begins to require abstractions –  if not clocks and calendars, then at least a shared language, a shared set of terms. Or as one newcomer to the house puts it, what we need, at the societal level are ‘words to encapsulate our days […] units of measurement, distinct time frames, precise terminology’.  

#2246

The community’s discussion of language and their attempts to find common terms for their shared temporality are among my favourite of the conversations in all four books. They are full of humour – the community suggests words for themselves, (loopers, repeaters, tracers) and words for the people they each day leave behind (noopers, returners, erasers). They have a multi-lingistic playfulness: among the terms suggested for what has befallen these people stuck in time are chronological accident, malheur de temps, Zeitunglück, Zeitunfall and anastrophe. The latter is especially interesting for its existing rhetorical meaning, a sentence or phrase whose structure inverts the usual or expected order. Balle is clearly having a lot of fun with these suggestions, enjoying her breakage of temporal language.  

None of these terms stick, however. This is partly because Tara’s community is already polyglottal, already has many existing and competing linguistic frames of reference with many different cultural worldviews embedded within them. And, of course, this is partly because language, even in this kind of multiplicity, is always imprecise, unequal to the task of describing the world. This is always the case, but it is all the more apparent when language is grappling with something we understand as imperfectly, as partially, as time. 

2026

I keep reading reviews of Volume Four of Volume – this shorthand title is increasingly (and charmingly) in use – that refer to Tara’s expanding community as utopian, as a grand socialist project, as a commune. And in many ways, it is – the residents share the basic tasks of living, as well as renovating and repairing, they often cook and eat communally. They are freed from the constraints and time-logic (the chrono-logic?) of capitalism (there is, reports one character ‘no need to assert outselves, perform, posture, pick up the pace, cross any finish line […] We d[on’t] need to flaunt our status or wealth […] because anyone could have the same’) and do indeed find something gentler, kinder, in its absence. 

But this is also, I think, not the point. What Balle has built for Tara is a small-scale society, a microcosm of something new – a new social order that has to find its own ways to negotiate the world and its phenomena. 

#2046, #2313

And yet there is one other accounting for time that occurs across Volume Four and that operates, in many ways, as a counterpoint to the community’s (doomed) linguistic reckoning. Part of the community’s work, as it grows, is to repair and refurnish the house – converting the cellar and barn into living quarters, refashioning scraps of fabric into bedding and clothes. It is physical, repetitive work; and it is the kind of work in which repeated actions – a single stitch, one stroke of a paintbrush or hammer or handsaw – quickly accrue into something larger, something in which both labour and time are made manifest. It is – unlike language – solid, tangible, concrete. It is work that progresses, even when time does not. A pair of community members discover some forgotten potatoes that have sprouted in a cabinet, setting into motion a number of experiments in making things grow. This too is progressive labour; this too a kind of evidence of time. ‘Maybe it’s in the hands’, Tara writes. ‘Maybe that’s how we get our bearings.’ 

2012, 2014, 2017, 2021

This is something in which I ardently believe, because I too have felt this in my body. There have been times (and there continue to be times) where I have kept my bearings by sewing, a relatively simple, and very repetitious kind of hand-work whose rewards are far more complex than they seem. There’s something about that accrual that is intensely satisfying, something about the transformation of flat fabric into a garment three-dimensional and worn against the body, something about the way the labour and the time required remain visible in the finished work. Writing – Tara must know this – is like this too. It is in the hands, and it is always a strange negotiation with both progressive and experiential time. 

#3446

Tara’s writing, her keeping of her journal, does begin to shift once she is no longer unwitnessed and alone. Increasingly, the interiority of her writing gives way to her recounting of conversations and encounters, especially the discussions the community frequently schedules; her quiet, contemplative voice to the voices of others. It’s a shift that begins in Volume Three, with her conversations with Henry, Olga and Ralf, but that quickly intensifies in Volume Four, as the Bremen community builds. 

What’s interesting about this is that the shift is far more subtle than it should be and than it sounds. Tara has for so long diarised the movements of her thinking, in all of its subtle variation, its frequent contradictions and reversals, and the texture of this is not dissimilar to the wide-ranging, polyvocal conversations she now reports. Both types of recounting, that is, are full of minor and polite disagreements, of points put down and picked back up again much later, of qualifications and adjustments. Both loop and meander; both are rhythmic: even as Tara’s world expands, that hypnotic quality in her recorded experience remains. 

It’s also fascinating that this shift also coincides with a change in translators within the series. Barbara J. Haveland, the series’ original translator retired after the publication of Volume Two, necessitating the switch to Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. Hersi Smith and Russell have spoken about the unique challenges of taking over the translation of a series partway through, of maintaining a ‘lexicon’ of terms and ‘turns of phrase’ in order to preserve Tara’s voice, as created by Haveland. And they have acknowledged that the timing of the ‘transition’ was narratively fortuitous, that with the expansion of Tara’s world, the ‘open[ing] up’ of her language, especially in conversation with new people, is inevitable.  

Indeed, Tara writes about the accidental mimicry – the benign but unintended ‘theft’ – that happens between members of the Bremen community, the ‘hands and arms and legs borrowing and copying and mirroring and reciprocating’. The language too: all of these shared codes that signal a belonging. Hersi Smith and Russell are long-term friends as well as co-translators, and their interest in friendship and collaboration also seems fitting in this context. 

Tara’s voice, in Volumes Three and Four, does seem to gradually and very subtly loosen – it is no less precise, just a little less inhibited; she is occasionally a little more ornate or abstract in her language, which has always tended plain. That it is impossible to tell how much of this is due to narrative or to translation or to both of these at once feels instructive. 

More and more now Tara realises that she is writing not because of a need to record a history – though it seems the group all but expects this of her – but to find a sense of her self, now that it is mixed in with ‘all the thoughts and voices that blur together’. It is her ‘way of being alone’.  

2026

I can’t decide if it is fitting or a sort of strangeness – though either way it’s difficult – to be making an argument for time as the central concern of Balle’s books at a point in time where we (Anglophone readers, that is) are only a little more than halfway through the septology. A lot could happen in three books, especially in a series that pays such scrupulous attention to the minutiae of a day, and that is simultaneously prone to swift reversals – Solvej Balle loves a cliffhanger, drops the ground from beneath Tara’s feet towards the end of every book. The problem with time – what makes it hard to capture, hard to write about  – is that we are always in the thick of it, and never able to conclude.