Time loop stories -- about a recurrent, involuntary, often daily trip to the past -- have been well represented in movies like Groundhog Day, Source Code, and Palm Springs. This subset of time travel in science fiction and fantasy has been less represented in novels, which would make Solvej Balle's seven-volume On the Calculation of Volume series (!) (translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland) welcome in any case. But it has additional treats for the mind.
My friend Dirk Vom Lehn told me about this series yesterday. I bought the first volume, finished reading it in the wee hours of the morning, and bought the other three (vols II, III, and IV) that are now available in English. I'm going to review each volume as soon as I finish reading it.
Tara and Thomas Selter are antiquarian book dealers in France -- which makes them appealing already. Tara travels to Paris to buy some books, and that's when (November 18) the time loop commences. She wakes up the next morning, and discovers that the rest of the world around her is waking up on November 18. When she returns home, she finds that Thomas is with the rest of the world. They're living their lives in a world in which the days progress as they do for you and me. Tara lives through November 18 over and over, and we're off and running.
As is the case with most other time loop stories, Tara has the advantage of knowing what's going to happen, hour by hour, minute by minute, as she lives in November 18 every day. And of course, as is also the case with most other time loop stories, this advantage soon become a burden and a curse. This sets up the heart of the story, as Tara struggles to understand what is going on, so she can surmount the steel grip of the time loop.
She tells Thomas what's happening -- the same story plus what happened on the previous day -- and he by and large tries to help. They visit a library to read up "on parallel universes and multiple worlds". (I wondered if that library had a copy of It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles?) But the metaphysics of time loops, fun as they may be for the reader, are a kind of hell for the character. Tara struggles to understand what's up. But nothing adds up. Her hair grows, because her body is progressing even as the world is on daily replay -- and she notes "I cut my nails, or rather, I cut them again, slowly, over the sink in the bathroom, because they had grown, as if time existed and I was snipping tiny slivers of time into the sink, then I turned on the faucet and washed them down the drain" -- but other things in the November 18 world keep reappearing, exactly as they were/are, and still other items get consumed and disappear. And those vexing inconsistencies resist being washed down the drain or anywhere.
I don't know if Solvej Balle intended to write a seven-volume series when she wrote the first volume, but such metaphysical complexities are grist for the mill of multiple volumes, and I'll be back here with my review of the second and succeeding volumes as soon as I've had the pleasure of reading them.
in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover
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