Ladies and gentlemen, this is personal growth. I’m actually reading a series without gaps of years between the books! I wrote about the second volume in Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series only a few weeks ago, and now I’ve finished the third (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell). As you might expect, this review will contain pretty significant spoilers for the first two books, though I’ll try not to give too many twists and turns away from the third.
As a quick reminder, if you’re new to this series – Tara is stuck in a timeloop. It is endlessly 18 November. She has lived through several years of this now, and no longer truly believes that 19 November is possibly on the horizon. The first book was about finding peace and space in this timeloop; the second was about claustrophobia and exploration. And the third… well, the second book ended with a big reveal. And this is a major spoiler for the first two books. The big twist is… it turns out Tara is not alone in her timeloop! Another person has been living the same circular existence as her, for the same length of time. His name is Henry Dale.
There are several long entries in this volume, explaining how they first encountered each other in a lecture theatre – where, even before they knew for certain that the other was an anomaly in the loop, they recognised something distinct about each other. Even though they are strangers, this shared strangeness is, of course, soemthing that brings them together intimately.
The thought of our meeting makes me smile now, and it occurs to me how long I’ve lived without this mutual recognition, the little mental jolt, a faint quiver in the brain as you recognize someone who recognizes you back. A sensation that had been absent for so long it came as a surprise: a peculiar new feeling which launched us into an odd little dance.
I am back in the apartment on Wiesenweg, alone now that we’ve parted ways, but still astonished that it’s possible for two people to share a common history in the midst of the eighteenth of November, a very brief history, but a history all the same, of meetings and goodbyes and reunions and plans to meet again.
It is surprisingly plain sailing for a long time. They live through dozens and dozens of days together – moving around, eating and talking and sharing their experiences. Henry has a young son in America, and has spent many of his days there – each day, doing an impromptu visit to his ex-wife and asking to spend the afternoon with his son. (As a reminder, they always start a day wherever they ended the previous one, so travel is possible.) Tara has spent years honing her own philosophy and approach to the extraordinary world she has found herself in, and it is understandably confronting to have to accommodate someone else’s. A blessing, but also a jolt to the rhythm she has established.
A world had opened up, and it was not all to the good; we were in some strange way bound together. There was a promise of more conversations, but not only that. There is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibilities for their baggage.
Because there are so many volumes, Balle can be spacious in how she describes this world. There is time for tangents – about Romans and their obsession with grain, about historians and ‘female history’ and a dispute about whether such a thing exists separately from man’s. For a long while, the two separate – Tara goes back to her husband, and has less success with him than she did in the first book. And she continues to age. She is years older than when the story started, while the world remains the same, over and over. I imagine that will become increasingly a plot point. How can she continue to visit Thomas when, in his eyes, his wife will have aged significantly overnight?
I shan’t say more about what happens in this volume, but the world has certainly opened up more than I anticipated at the outset. I never really worried that Balle would run out of steam, because she writes so beautifully and engagingly about the utterly mundane and thus could never exhaust her material. But I love the direction the series is heading in, and the distinctive nature she manages to give each book – even while the same day repeats itself time and again. I think the first book remains my favourite of the three, but they are all triumphs, and I’m excited to get onto the third.