On the calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle
Danish fiction
Original title – Om udregning af rumfang
Translator – Barbara J Haveland
Source – Review copy
This book wasn’t out when the long list came out, so I managed to get a review copy of it. It is the first of a series of five books that the writer initially self-published. But it has since gained ground and has been translated into many languages. Solvej Balle had an earlier book translated into English in the nineties and also wrote radio dramas. She was heard as one of the new female writers in the nineties from Nordic countries with a modernist writing style. But this book sees her taking a turn with the style of this book, which is the first in a series of seven books that follow people like the main character in this book, Tara, as she is caught in a loop of time reliving the same day. Now Balle says she had the idea for this book years before Groundhog Day, which is a film with a similar idea. But the time loop was in science fiction before Heinlein wrote a short story in the late fifties around time travel (I used to like his books and short stories as a kid)
I have moved back to the table by the window and before long I hear Thomas’s feet on the stairs and the passage again.
I hear him in the kitchen and the hall. I hear him open the door facing the road and go out to fetch a leek from the garden and some onions from the shed. I can hear him pulling on the pair of wellingtons by the door. I can hear him walking down the side of the house, and then nothing until he returns with his vegetables. I hear him chopping vegetables for soup.
Hear the rattle of the pot on the stove and, once the soup is ready, the scrape of chair legs on the kitchen floor. A little later I hear the gush of water through the pipes as Thomas washes his plate in the kitchen sink, then I hear him putting the plate back in the cupboard before going through to the living room. He spends his evening reading Jocelyn Miron’s Lucid Investigations and it’s almost midnight before he switches off the hall light and goes upstairs, but that is a while off yet, the evening is just beginning. Thomas is getting changed in the bedroom above and I am remembering a long succession of November days that have begun to run together in my mind.There are 121 days to remember. If 1 can.
The opening as she starts tio record the days in a journal
SO the framing devices of this book are that Tara and her husband Thomas are antique book sellers and are in Paris for one night on the way to attend an auction and buy books. But we meet Tara as she wakes on her 121st, 18th November. One day she got stuck in. The lop of this day, but for her, she has just settled for this as her life, and what we see is what happens when you accept b43eing in the same day, how those subtle little changes occur every time she relives the day, change the day slightly this is a nuanced book about little changes. The only actual event in the whole day was meeting an old friend and his girlfriend for a meal, in which her hand was burnt and thus held in cold water. The title is a nod to this moment, and it is a way to calculate volume from the displaced water. Paret me things, this book has a huge nod to the French Oulipo group. The circumstance of this book is that the character is stuck on 18th November for a year, as the book carries on . But how do you take that as a way to write ?
Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside of our con-trol, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or that of even smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it’s a chemical reaction, I don’t know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other’s company. Maybe we are a weather system – condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters. Or a weather system which, until the eighteenth of November saw no disasters.
Later in the book her view of it all in a way
That is the question she has taken a different route to than Groundhog Day. What happens when the person stuck in the time loop just accepts it instead of making use of it like in Groundhog Day? What happens when the changes over the day after day are ever so subtle and gradual? This is what she has captured. If Knausgaard wrote sci-fi, this would be the subtle little things that happen in the days as they unfold. As I say, it reminds me of the sort of challenge Oulipo writers set themselves in their writing. A sort of waiting for Godot, but this is a woman just waiting for the 19th of November, stuck in the 18th, like Beckett’s characters stuck waiting for the elusive Godot. I love to see how she will carry this on in the following six books. I have been told there are other characters in the other books! Have you read this? What are your thoughts?
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