A few years after his theory of relativity changed our fundamental understanding of the concept of time, Einstein wrote that “there is no audible ticking anywhere in the world that can be considered time.” What he meant was that timekeeping as we understand it – the seconds, minutes and hours given to us precisely by our clocks – does not exist in any physical way. The clock is a human invention, a system that we impose on the world in order to maintain, for our own sanity, some semblance of order.

Time in fiction works the same way, except that in books the writer alone controls the organizational system, measuring time through sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, and putting it in the service of the plot. Only in fiction is time travel – or the complete stopping of time – actually possible; the reader can start a page one day and finish it in a different year. In his seven-part novel On the calculation of volume (whose first two books have now appeared in English, as translated by Barbara J. Haveland), Danish writer Solvej Balle pushes writer’s privilege to its limits. Balle’s protagonist, Tara Selter, is a rare book dealer in France who found herself trapped in a time loop, a ruminative version of Groundhog Day which sees her constantly repeating one day, the same day, over and over again: November 18.

On the calculation of volume (Book I)

By Solvej Ball

On the calculation of volume (Book II)

By Solvej Ball

“Every night when I go to sleep… it’s November eighteenth and every morning when I wake up it’s November eighteenth,” Tara explains at the start of Balle’s first opus (which was released shortlisted for the National Book Prize for Translated Literature this year). On the calculation of volume is a book of hours in its most literal sense, a diary in which Tara recounts each of her November 18ths and her attempts, both hopeful and desperate, to break free from the cycle in which she is trapped. Having left the northern French town where she and Thomas, her husband and business partner, run an antiquarian book business to attend an auction in Paris, Tara inexplicably wakes up one morning to a confusing scenario. Time has “fallen apart” and Tara’s days repeat themselves, a fact that becomes clear to her as she watches another hotel guest drop off a piece of bread at breakfast on time. exact location where he had done it the previous morning. Tara’s observations show a growing sense of despair over the course of the first book and part of the second as she attempts to accept her new reality.

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There is no longer a yesterday in Tara’s life, nor a tomorrow either. Instead, there is a fluid but constant present with its own set of internal rules. Some objects travel with Tara as she rehearses her November 18th, like the notebooks – part captain’s logbook, part prison diary – in which she records each day’s events. Yet, unlike the most popular iterations of the time loop genre, her physical location remains unlimited: if she falls asleep in a different city than the one in which she began her day, Tara will remain in this new location in the morning, rather than to be taken back to her hotel room in Paris.

But these rules only apply to Tara, and no one else. For the other characters, time seems to progress normally, but each time the clock strikes midnight, the day goes back and wipes the slate – and their memories – clean. Only Tara is able to remember what happened during the previous iteration on November 18; Thomas, for example, approaches every November 18 as if it were his first. In a poignant sequence from the first volume, Tara is faced, every morning, with having to explain to Thomas what happened and what will happen again. “We couldn’t find the error,” Tara wrote. “We might find patterns and inconsistencies.” In the second volume, she will also have to do this with her parents. Apathetic acceptance will ensue, as Tara attempts to forget herself as an individual with a past. “This is how I spend my days: I throw myself into the crowd, I let myself be carried away, I am on the move… Once I leave the metro stations or land on the sidewalk of a bus stop, I lose my momentum. I slow down, I stop. The meaning is clear: without external signals that time is passing, life, even on the page, stops.

On the calculation of volumeThe premise of this project could, in other hands, be reduced to a gimmick. But in Haveland’s rendering, Balle’s spare prose has an understated clarity that gives philosophical resonance to this fantastical setup. These two volumes are evolving rapidly; their brevity (each is less than 200 pages) is at odds with the feeling of boundlessness that accompanies Tara’s predicament. Balle’s work disrupts one of the fundamental laws of the universe: time moves forward. Only the act of writing allows Tara to regain some control over her time. “That’s why I started writing,” Tara notes at the beginning of the first novel. “Because time has collapsed. Because I found a ream of paper on the shelf. Because I’m trying to remember. Because the newspaper remembers it. And sorrows can bring healing. But without other people experiencing the same events alongside him, do any of his actions matter? Without time, life becomes static, a repetitive series of journal entries all marked with the same date.

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In the first volume, Tara is still trying to understand the new order in which she must now structure her life; in the end, she is resigned to her fate and yet proactive about how she will exist in it. “There’s something beneath my November day,” she reflects of the first book’s conclusion, “and the woods are tugging at me like they want me to stay.” He clings to the soles of my boots, he wants to talk to me about September and October. There is another type of time apart from that dictated by the calendar: the cycle that belongs to nature, reflected in the change of the seasons. Tara, in the second book, will come up with a clever plan to take advantage of a year’s weather thanks to the different climates of Europe. As she travels by train to different countries to the rhythm of the imagined seasons – both the warmer parts of the south and the colder parts of the north – Tara will find a way to feel the passage of time. But this is of course only an imitation of linearity.

As a dealer in antiquarian books, Tara creates her life’s work through the written word, but her connection to books is passive; her job requires that she view them as purely physical objects. “My relationship with books has always been about the eyes and the hands,” she admits at one point. But by recording her days, Tara becomes a writer herself. And even if the plot of his life has escaped him, his diary once again imposes order. In chronicling the events of her repetitive days, Tara undertakes the kind of time travel that only writing – not science, technology or engineering – can enable. It creates a beginning and a middle and, hopefully, an end.