ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME

A woman navigates a world in which time has stopped moving forward for her.

This slim but densely meditative novel, the first in a seven-volume series by veteran Danish author Balle, is narrated by Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller living in northern France. She has recently discovered that she keeps repeating November 18—thrusting her into a world where ”time fell apart,” as she puts it. This doesn’t provoke panic, nor does it instill an urge for intellectual and moral improvement à la Groundhog Day. Rather, Tara moves in a sea of bemused curiosity—what is she allowed to retain from day to day, and what gets erased? The early part of her chronicle—the novel is formatted as diary entries, numbering the days she’s been “stuck” on November 18—concern her efforts to sort out the reasons why time is out of joint with the help of her husband and business partner, Thomas. Every day she informs him of her predicament (which he accepts with admirable equipoise) as they attempt to determine what might have caused it. She retraces her steps—a visit with a fellow bookseller, the acquisition of an ancient Roman coin, an accidental burn on her hand—but no explanation is forthcoming. Some things endure as the days repeat, like her notebook, and the stores she shops at don’t seem to replenish their stocks. Though Tara isn’t driven to despair by all this, Balle captures a sense of disorientation and loss that intensifies in the later pages of the novel, as if she’s working through the stages of death: “I am a monster, a beast, a pest,” she laments. The story concludes at the end of her first year’s worth of November 18s, and though there’s no resolution, Balle has set up the emotional and intellectual stakes for the project; though temporally, Tara is stuck in neutral, intellectually the story plainly has lots of places to go.

A sober, thoughtful study of time and connection.