Book name- ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME (I)
Author- Solvej Balle
Published by- Faber & Faber
Price- Rs 899
Here comes another experimental septology from a Nordic author — it has been translated by Barbara J. Haveland — that plays with its form and makes a point of it. Viewing the earth from the moon, it has people. And it has time. It has that feeling that new things happen. It is titanic — people jaywalking, napping, kissing in the burnished anticipation of what-comes-next. In time-loop plots, the protagonist is petrified at a thread of time that perhaps goes on without them. What force replaces them?
On the Calculation… contains one of the most scorching expressions of romantic jealousy. Our protagonist, Tara Selter, envies a grocer’s privilege of meeting her husband without the knowledge that this poor man has inconspicuously lived a thousand versions of the same day. Oh, to know someone for the first time again. A million first times. The price: each time a nail is driven through your being.
This is a breakup novel set over the course of a year-long day. A couple drifts apart on the more interesting axis of the space-time continuum. And the calculation of volume, of our personal spaces, of our capacity for hope and the unspent days of our lives, acquires a fourth dimension.
Tara is an antique bookseller. It runs her household. Her two friends, a couple, collect and sell antique coins. On November 18, she visits them, burns her hand on their old heater, and disrupts time. Immediately before this, she notes the closeness between them “doesn’t shut other people out, the self-absorption of a couple in the first throes of love”. She is reminded of years ago when she met her husband.
In a way, the ensuing time loop becomes an unregulated sandbox to test the bounds of the love between Tara and her husband. They go on a billion first dates, make love on the floor, schlep around with joy, lock their horns. Her husband and everyone forgets everything that happens in the eternal today, a new opportunity and love’s labour lost. That she is forced to have a parataxic relationship with him that eventually throttles her. When random objects — frying pans, eggshells — start disappearing in spasms of time, it is horrifying. Father Time as poltergeist is a brilliant device.
Attention to evocative detail is a hallmark of plotless, slim volumes of artistry that have come to rouse prize juries. Gwendoline Riley’s books capture English life at a microscopic level in the specific way steam rolls off a lachrymose face. Vigdis Hjorth and Dag Solstad do this for Norway. Solvej Balle’s descriptions of the French quotidian instil a similar quality, and in places seem to make a political argument about archiving and what cannot be archived (the “ghost” and “monster” can be seen as parallels to the Global North and South), about wastefulness. In the history of Big Events, how do we record romance? Ranajit Guha, the radical, pioneering historiographer who founded the Subaltern Studies school, wrote about the excision of subaltern realities from official records because of translational, attitudinal differences. Can we be sure a future reader of our current archives will be able to calculate the volume of despair and resilience that coexist in the world, and which are the cause and effect of the Big Events? For each November 18 she lives, Tara crosses off a notch in her notebook, until she loses sight of the point. And the notebook. But doesn’t her love live on? Will she remember that her fondness for her husband made her a ghost in her own life, forced to seek refuge in damp rooms and telescopes, peeing in the bushes to feel? Will it matter? Only time (and volumes III to V and onward, still being translated to
English from the Danish original) will tell.