Review: On the Calculation of Volume II by Solvej Balle
translated by Barbara Haveland
original publication (in Danish): 2020
first English edition: 2024, New Directions
185 pages
grab a copy here or through your local independent bookstore or library
We left Tara Selter at the end of Book I attempting to figure out how to move forward, despite being trapped in November 18 (or maybe it’s everyone else who’s trapped, and only she is moving forward?). Her husband had told her that she needed to go to Paris herself to see if she could jump back into Time–he couldn’t help her. Despite Tara’s year coming full circle, November 18 continues to be November 18 every time she wakes up, so Tara needs to find some other way to give meaning to what has been happening to her.
Book II is a fantastical travelogue, of sorts, in which Tara travels around Europe trying to construct a year out of “fragments.” She visits her parents during what, for Tara, is Christmas (though for them, of course, it’s only November 18). After explaining to them and her sister that she has been trapped in time, Tara convinces them to celebrate an early Christmas, complete with a Christmas pudding and a Bûche de Noël. The family has a pleasant Christmas dinner, but of course everything (except Tara’s memory of it and some food she has kept by her bedside) is erased with the rising of the sun. As she did with her husband Thomas, Tara leaves her parents’ house sadly, quietly, knowing that they will have no memory that she had stopped there at all.
Tara travels for most of this novel, overhearing passengers on trains telling their stories to one another, talking on the phone, discussing their most personal problems. Still, Tara is outside of it all. As she tries to explain to her father, what is happening to her is like “a sort of interweaving of the two times,” in which she can consume things that subsequently disappear from the world. At times, Tara sees herself as a consuming “monster,” one that invisibly dips into the world and takes things that won’t be replaced, without anyone knowing. Thus, she sticks to buying food that will be thrown out or that is in such abundance that its absence won’t be noticed.
Traveling up north in search of winter, Tara encounters a meteorologist, who discusses with her what it really means to follow the seasons. At one point, they talk about how people seem to demand certain things of seasons, like snow in winter or rain in spring, and then become disgruntled if the season is warmer or colder than usual, as if it isn’t playing by the rules. This discussion is just one of the points in the novel that makes us stop and consider Time itself–how we break it up and compartmentalize it in order to make sense of the passing of the year. The weather changes, food and clothing change, but humans call these shifts “summer” or “winter” so as to prepare for these changes and make them more understandable.
While traveling in search of the season corresponding to her own movement through time, Tara keeps two notebooks: one tracking the places she’s visited corresponding to the season she is seeking, and the one that we are reading. At times, Tara mentions what she has written in her seasons notebook, but we can never read it. This is fitting, since that notebook disappears halfway through the book, stolen by what Tara suspects is a soccer fan in town for a big match. And just like that, Tara drops her search for seasons, having moved through an entire year with nothing to show for it. And she had been so optimistic: “If I want seasons, I will have to build them myself. If I am to have a future, I will have to build it myself. I put the pieces together, little fragments of season and I write it all down in my manual: the ingredients of the seasons” (82).
What emerges in this book and its predecessor, one realizes, is an attempt to define Time’s shape. Is it like a river, and Tara is stuck on a shoal? Is it a construction that we are subconsciously always building to give meaning to our lives? Later on, Tara compares it to a container, one that we fill with meaningful moments. It’s almost as if Balle’s novel is a series of attempts to solve a Rubik’s cube, but the cube is Time and we are Balle’s rapt audience, having never thought of making the moves that she is attempting.
Time, Tara sees, is that compressed moment when the woman driving her on a snow-covered winding road to a guest house nearly collides with an oncoming truck. Everything happens in a couple of seconds, but the entire incident seems stretched out.
Time, Tara realizes, is that stream that keeps moving after someone has died. Wandering around the graveyard of an old church, she reads the birth and death dates on the stones, thinking that she nearly joined the dead just the day before on that winding road.
Constructing the seasons, as Tara does, means that she has to live purposefully, sniffing the air for the shift in seasons that only she could detect in that undercurrent of time that her own body is riding (since her hair is still growing, for example, and any injuries she sustains eventually heal). She has to look for appropriate foods for the appropriate season, which forces her to wander from France to Scandinavia, back south to Germany and then Spain. She switches from wool to light jackets, and from boots to sandals, and back again. But then, as mentioned before, her seasons book disappears and she is left, once again, to try and find her way to November 19.
On the 701st November 18, Tara writes, “I have no seasons and I am not scouting for locations for a film. Seasons are not scenes and locations. And you cannot construct a year out of fragments of November. Of course you can’t” (137). Just a few pages before, she had been trying to hard to do just that, but the disappearance of the book reinforces for her the absolute absurdity of what is happening to her. She can’t get out of November 18 and doesn’t know what to try next. Chasing the seasons had given her purpose and may have offered one potential way to move forward in a new current. This has failed, but a new way of finding purpose occurs to Tara after she has settled into a life in Düsseldorf.
The Roman coin that had featured in the first book, and which Tara had been carrying throughout her travels, reappears near the end of the second volume. Tara happens to pull it out of her bag and has a strange reaction to it. Something about the coin, which features Antoninus Pius (a Roman emperor from AD 138 to 161) on one side and the Roman goddess Annona with a grain measure and ears of corn on the other, sets Tara to thinking about the movement of objects through time and history itself.
Tara calls it “a historic object, an emblem from the past, a baton passed down through the centuries, a metallic witness to bygone ages or whatever” (153). But then she spends time looking at it, thinking about it, connecting it to her own time as an antiquarian book dealer, in which she had thought that she was interested in historical objects for the history, but realizes, now, that she loved those objects for their materiality–the way they felt and looked. She thinks about how we invest objects with meaning, and, most importantly for the purposes of this novel, how some objects, like the coin, “had dropped out of history” (158). Is this what has happened to Tara?
This, then, is Tara’s new purpose: she dives into Roman history, taking out books, buying a laptop and doing research on the internet, taking notes, doing everything she can to learn about the conditions that produced that coin. This new purpose takes up her waking hours, and though everything she types and saves on her computer vanishes the next day, still she does her research, using her mind and printed-out sheets of paper that she keeps near her to track her knowledge. And then, while slipping into lectures on Roman history at the university, she discovers something that she hadn’t considered possible–there are others like her, trying to find their way back into Time.
In a way, Solvej Balle has written a Last Man/Woman narrative, but with a twist. Unlike in Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H. G. or Manon Steffan Ros’s The Blue Book of Nebo, for instance, in which an individual or family finds that they are the only ones left around (as far as they can tell) after an unspecified disaster, Balle’s Tara is surrounded by people everywhere she goes. She interacts with them, but she retains her memories while everyone else resets with the rising of the sun. She is alone but not alone. And yet, there are those other people who are also trying to find their way out of November 18…
Books III and IV will be out in English this November.
