Antiquarian bookseller Tara Selter is in Paris. After stopping at various bookshops, she spends the evening with friends and returns to her hotel. In the breakfast room the next morning, she reads the paper and watches a man drop a slice of bread, pick it up, think for a minute and then throw it away. There’s just one problem: the same man dropped the same slice of bread the day before. The date on her newspaper is the same, too: 18 November. The next day, it is 18 November again. And the next. ‘Time has fallen apart,’ Tara says. 

On the Calculation of Volume is a projected septology, five volumes of which have been published in Danish, with three in English translation (the first two by Barbara J Haveland and this most recent book by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell). In these quietly absorbing books, Solvej Balle deftly uses the idea of a time loop to explore the far reaches of human psychology. Through beautifully rendered scenes of ordinary life, Balle (who holds a master’s degree in philosophy) examines how every aspect of a person might be affected if the world around them reset at the end of the day. What would it be like to live on a different timeline from everyone else? What could you do? What would you? Her investigations provide a map not just of the specific and extraordinary circumstances of her narrator, but also of what it means to be human.

Book I begins on Tara’s 121st 18 November, when she starts a journal chronicling her strange new life. She tells us that she has left Paris and gone back to the fictional French town of Clairon-sous-Bois, where she lives with her husband, Thomas. The couple make love on the living-room floor, go for walks in the woods, shop and cook together. But every morning, Thomas wakes up on 18 November as if for the first time, surprised to see his wife who should be in Paris. At first, Tara starts each day explaining the rift in time to her husband. But eventually she finds the stack of days between them has grown too large and retreats to the spare room, letting the sounds of Thomas moving about the house fill her hours. 

The time glitch works in ways that are sometimes mysterious to both narrator and reader. Tara must ‘persuade’ objects to stay with her, often sleeping with them under her pillow, lest they disappear back to where they were at the beginning of the day. But the governing rule for this odd reality is that Tara is part of the material world. Although Thomas doesn’t change from one 18 November to the next, Tara ages. She can travel through space if not time, waking up wherever she falls asleep. And, most intriguingly, whatever she eats stays eaten. A leek she digs up and cooks doesn’t come back; her local supermarket runs out of orange-flavoured chocolate. ‘I am a monster,’ she thinks. 

By the end of the first instalment, Tara has left Thomas and returned to Paris. She has lived a full year’s worth of 18 Novembers – 365 days – and tries to ‘leap’ back into progressive time by repeating her original 18 November. No luck. In Book II, she begins to think ‘there is no way out’. She decides that if she cannot rejoin the normal flow of time, she will make seasons happen for herself, re-creating the year by travelling to other climates. She spends ‘Christmas’ with her perplexed parents, for whom the meal is more than a month early. Taking a train to Bremen, then others on to Hamburg, Odense and Lund, recording meteorological data in a green notebook, Tara looks for ‘puddles covered by a thin film of ice that cracks when you step on it’ and other signs of winter. 

In Book I Balle explores the kind of loneliness that only exists in the presence of another; in Book II she considers the kind that occurs in true solitude. Tara becomes obsessive, first about seasons and then about an ancient Roman coin she carries with her from Paris. In Düsseldorf she rents a flat and dives into research about the world in which her coin (a sestertius) was struck, captivated by this item that has ‘dropped out of history’. She spends days 889–1,053 absorbed in ancient Rome: grain production, trade routes, construction methods. Her fixation wanes when she meets, for the first time, someone else who is ‘trapped in the eighteenth of November’. 

In Book III, Tara is ‘no longer alone’. Henry Dale, a 37-year-old sociologist, has recognised her as an anomaly in the otherwise perfectly repetitive pattern of his own 18 November. Both Tara and Henry feel they have ‘been rebuilt’ by the 1,144 days of their experience, although Henry’s response to finding himself in a time loop differs markedly from Tara’s. He used it to catch up on the ‘endless train of tasks hurtling towards him’ that characterised his life before he got stuck. Realising that was futile, he flew to Ithaca, New York, to visit his young son. He thinks Tara is overreacting by purchasing expired food (her attempt to mitigate the problem of consumption) but follows her lead anyway once he moves into her flat.

Initially, they orbit each other suspiciously, but soon they develop a rapport. In one virtuoso scene, Tara explains that objects – ‘shoes, ships and sealing wax’ – were what sparked her interest in the Romans, not ‘causes and effects, winners and losers’. Henry, cooking dinner (fennel and rice), is unsurprised. ‘After all, history has never been interested in you either,’ he says. It has ‘always been written by men, for men, about the world of men’. They argue. Tara doesn’t like ‘how he divided the world into two piles’. Henry splits the fennel and rice between their two plates. Tara points out that the ‘history of grain was shared … Everything was woven together. Power and fertility and the distribution of grain’. Henry notices that his rice, half-eaten, is full of maggots. 

Five hundred-odd days later, they meet others like them: Olga, a seventeen-year-old with a social activist bent, and Ralf, who works in IT at a logistics firm. Unlike Tara and Henry, Olga and Ralf think they’ve been stuck in time because ‘they were meant to meet each other and make the world a better place’. Ralf wants to do this by rushing around saving construction workers from fatal falls and preventing car crashes. Olga thinks this is not ‘solving the real issues. The structural ones … The foundation itself’. In Olga’s idealism we see Tara’s inwardness uncomfortably reflected – and perhaps our own. Tara has tried to minimise the damage she does to the world but made no real attempt at positive change. If one reads these enthralling books as (in part) climate crisis allegories, then Olga’s accusation that Tara is too self-absorbed carries much greater weight. 

But On the Calculation of Volume is not a topical parable; it is a timeless and brilliant excavation of the ways in which we as human beings relate to ourselves, our surroundings and each other. Balle has dug a hole in the recognisable universe and started to fill it, one meticulous detail at a time, with a new world. What felt claustrophobic in the first volume feels full of possibility by the end of the third.