Talking In Circles
On Solvej Balle's "On the Calculation of Volume IV", translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
Previously on On the Calculation of Volume….
Normal spoiler caveats apply: you’re reading a post about the fourth book in a seven book series, a series of books about a European woman, Tara Selter, who is repeating November 18 over and over again. In these middle volumes, without the need to establish the concept at the start, these books kind of malinger along, picking up new concepts and working out new ideas, but not much ever happens, which I suppose is appropriate for books about one day’s repetition. (If they skipped to just the good parts, you wouldn’t quite get that experiential length.) Book Four brings more and more people into Tara’s closed loop, and these people talk, and talk, and talk. Tara remains in the time-repeaters compound in Bremen and records all this talking, the arguments, the breakthroughs, the funny little connections that brew in a rapidly expanding community. Hey, didn’t I see you in Milan, also strangely out of step with the world? Wait, we stayed in the same abandoned home? More and more of regular society creeps back into the novel along with all these people — we have repeaters who have found love in the many November 18ths, at least one who has committed a crime, some who are simply annoying tourists, time loop or no, and some who have even been as far around the world as Australia, which does bring up some International Date Line intrigue. (I’m not sure how this isn’t addressed in the novel — does that not get you to the 19th, even if just for show?) What was striking about the first couple books was their extreme loneliness, but there’s now a constellation of folks around, and maybe too many for comfort after Tara’s years of solitude. There’s a touch of irony as the desire for some kind of normalcy is met, but not in quite the right way; the monkey’s fist puts down another finger as Tara is delivered more and more pieces of a normal world, except for the days coming back. “It is not the same as a nineteenth of November,” Tara reflects. “It is not a life with Thomas.” (Her husband! Remember him???) “It is not the same as getting everything back, because there, inside the relief, the busyness, the routines, and all our discussions, sits the knowledge that the world is no longer the same.”
