I’ve changed as a person. I’m becoming one of those people who reads sequels/series in relatively quick succession! I started Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series in January, and I’ve made it to the fourth volume – published in Danish in 2022, and in translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell in 2026, making it perfect for Women in Translation Month. (Incidentally, I wonder why the translators have changed since the first volume?) Here are my thoughts on the books in the series so far.
Even though I’ve read the third book as recently as May, I did have to dig around to remember what happened (and found this excellent essay). This review will have spoilers for the other books so far, of course: as a reminder, Tara is an antiquarian book dealer stuck in a timeloop. She is 35, though I’d remembered her being much older. For thousands of days, it has been 18 November. The twist is that she always starts the day wherever she ended the previous one – so, in the course of three books, she has travelled far and wide. Sometimes she returns to her husband, Thomas. Sometimes she visits her parents. The early volumes are beautiful explorations of what it looks like to find contentment alone in a world you can’t change. Then it becomes more claustrophobic. And then more people appeared. Henry, Rolf, and Olga were also trapped in 18 November.
Well, ready yourself. The stream of ‘loopers’ just keeps coming in volume IV – and that terminology is one of the main things that the book explores. What should they call themselves? What should they call the ‘normal’ people? What about names for lengths of time? If the third volume took tangents on history and feminism, the main undercurrent of this one is language and how it forms and changes meaning – which I imagine was particularly tricky for the translators. (I also imagine that ‘noopers’ being the negative of ‘loopers’ works better in the Danish equivalent.)
I started making notes about who the people were – Sonia the doctor; Marlice who also ‘works in the hospital industry’ in the hospital laundry; Rosi the au pair – but I quickly last track. Each is sketched out, and some are more dominant in the story, but their real function seems to be a united swell of people. As Tara reflects towards the end of the book:
Our house has become a reception centre, a gathering place, a meeting point. People arrive alone or in small groups. Some arrive very quietly, as if they have slipped unseen through the back door. Others arrive like peacocks, strutting through the gate and up the driveway as if a red carpet had been rolled out all the way to the front door. Some leap into focus the moment we meet them, and within an ahour, you feel like you know them. Others take longer to emerge from the bakcground, a gradual reveal, and some you barely notice until suddenly they unfold – offering a story, an idea, a gesture, an experience – and all at once, you seen them in colour, brightly lit.
For they are living together in an abandoned building – and people start living in a flat across the road, too. The loopers (if we use that term) are drawn from seeing posters that Tara and her friends put up in the third book, or perhaps by word-of-mouth – because each person takes breaks from the shared community, travelling around, encountering other loopers. The timeloop is no longer something that Tara faces alone. Instead, she is now a small part of a much larger group – and that brings a completely different dynamic to her life and to the novel. Balle captures the amorphousness really well in passages like this:
It is in the way things move. Cutlery and bowls making their way to the table. A hand reaching into a drawer for a handful of spoons, the sound of metal. The drawer sliding shut again. A cupboard opening, a stack of plates balancing in a pair of hands, then other hands bringing cups to the table. A pot of coffee is brought in, then another. Tea, brewed by Sonia, carried to the table by Peter, poured by Rosi, and Henry gets up to fetch milk while I take the empty coffee pot back to the kitchen and return with a full one.
It is this intertwining that makes it feel as though we are a group. The voices in the room, the eyes sweeping the table and the objects migrating from the kitchen to the conservatory. Then someone asks whether Olga is up yet, or whether anyone has seen Peter. Someone answers, or throws out a guess across the table. More questions follow, another scan of the table. Would anyone like more tea, are there any more oranges, and is there anything else I should bring up from the basement? Sentences floating, a voice replying, sometimes several at once. Yes, on the table in the kitchen; or no, she’s still sleeping; or he was here just a moment ago; and then the coffee’s ready, are there enough cups? And new questions come up, followed by comments on the questions and an answer from the other end of the table. We speak into the air over the table and answer on behalf of one another. We check to see whether we’re out of bread, and someone mentions that the lamp in the upstairs bathroom needs a blub, and then someone else remembers seeing a box of old light bulbs in the basement.
The individuals become almost interchangeable. A series that started about the strangeness of becoming unique has now changed into one about finding your place in community – and, in some ways, it is like being from any minority and then finding other like-minded people. At first, you are overjoyed that other people ‘get it’. And then the disparites and disjoints start to show. Just because you have the same experience that differentiates you from the majority doesn’t mean that your perspectives will completely align.
One argument that arises in the novel is the ‘why’ of it all. It’s something Tara didn’t dwell on in the first books, but there are some loopers for whom it is all-encompassing – particularly those who blame themselves. Marlice stole a hospital gown and was caught – is that the reason she was condemned to the loop? Have others made it out of the loop, and they are the weak ones who are stuck? Olga, the teenager from the previous book, gives her take:
The world is not a calm sea where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat, she said. The world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.
She believed our concerns about being at fault were an overestimation of our own abilities. As if we could set the universe in motion, out of commission, put the day on repeat. If we were serious, she couldn’t see why we hadn’t started putting our superpowers to better use by now. If it’s actually possible to defy the laws of nature and the entire universe by stealing a hospital gown, then we’d better get to work.
Of course, this novel is still in Tara’s diary entries – but in volume four she becomes more a documenter than a thinker. She is sharing the backs and forths of the arguments around her, and recedes behind the blur of noise. I missed the more pensive Tara from the first book, where the whole experience was focalised through her eyes and her mind. I can see why Balle has evolved the series, and the neverending flood of loopers definitely makes this book succinct, but it’s my least favourite so far. Which isn’t to say it’s bad – I still really enjoyed it – but it didn’t have quite the beauty and magic that made me fall for the first one.
Having said that… there is another twist towards the end that has made me very excited to read the fifth one, translated in November! Watch this space.