“Time is relative.” – Albert Einstein

Is time a social construct? Does a watched pot boil?

Solvej Balle’s spare, elegant novel, On the Calculation of Volume I, turns into a temporal nightmare. At first everything is idyllic. The narrator, Tara Selter, is an antiquarian bookseller, and her mellow husband, Thomas, is her business partner. She attends rare book auctions and estate sales while he mails the packages and attends to the finances. The happy couple make love once or twice a day.

And then it all changes. Every day is the eighteenth of November. The novel opens on her 121st eighteenth of November.  She is so familiar with the eighteenth of November that she can interpret every sound in the kitchen and predict the weather.

Tara is trapped in a time loop.

Of course you think of Groundhog Day, the comedy with Bill Murray and Andie McDowell. I love Groundhog Day, but On the Calculation of Volume I is more like Dora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House meets Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Oh, and then they’re joined by Ingmar Bergman. That is, if Nora, Gregory, and Bergman got trapped in a time loop – together. 

As time passes, if that’s what it does, Tara becomes frustrated. Every day she must explain again to Thomas what has happened. He believes her and is sympathetic. They try to map events and see where there might be a gap or variation. 

The novel is intensely literary, a long meditation, interrupted by the ordinary events. She becomes more withdrawn and desperately solitary. She hides in the guest room at home so Thomas can have a normal life: he thinks she is in Paris on the eighteenth of November. She pees in the back yard so he won’t hear the toilet flush. She lives in silence.

 Eventually, she fights against her routine.  And she finds evidence of her effect on reality.  A grocery store runs out of the orange chocolate she likes.  Other commodities also disappear. She has to shop at different stores now.

And by the time she moves into a run-down house, after she gets the key from a realtor and copies it, I’m beginning to have thoughts about the stagnation of the continuum and wondering if she’s trapped by routine and fighting it and herself. Or is that too metaphorical? I’m winging it. By the way, there are allusions to Einstein and existentialism.

On the Calculation of Volume I is shortlisted for the Booker International Prize. It is the first of a seven-book series. She doesn’t wrap up Volume I so I’m desperate to read the next volume. Darn it!