Well, I entitled my review of the third book in the seven-volume On the Calculation of Volume series "Multiplication", but after reading the fourth book of the series -- I just finished it a few minutes ago -- I think I might well have been premature with that title. The number of people trapped in November 18 in the fourth book multiply faster than bunnies, and as I said in my review of the third book, this gives author Solvej Balle the avenue to explore a myriad of angles and theories about what happened to her and her temporal siblings as each of them offer their evolving views.
These range from the nature of time to multiple universes to the nature of everything, organic and manufactured, in their lives and throughout history. Everyone has an opinion, and a shade of opinion, sometimes as mundane as Tara herself wondering "weren’t our vehicles first and foremost a form of protection?" That struck a chord in me, because it reminded me of something Marshall McLuhan once said to me, as we strolled the streets of Toronto, on one of my visits, with my wife, in the late 1970s: "You know," he said, "the automobile retrieves the knight in shining armour," as a flashy Chevy Impala from the 1950s with fins and all drove by.
Sometimes the insights were so recondite that they didn't make sense, at least, not to me. One of the new character inmates of November 18, Milly, shares her opinion that "we’re the ones who can kill in the eighteenth, not them [i.e, we the readers]. When they kill, their actions vanish overnight. When we kill, we end lives. Irrevocably." Then she adds, "We were both more dangerous and more vulnerable than those who moved through the world believing that the eighteenth was simply a day between the seventeenth and the nineteenth, because no matter what happened to them, they would wake up to the eighteenth again." So ... I don't quite get this -- I and I assume you move through a world in which the 18th of any month is simply a day between the 17th and the 19th, and if someone in our world died, we would not wake up the next day and find them alive, again, right? Maybe an error crept into the translation. Maybe an error in my scrambled brain. If not, maybe I'm living in a world which is somehow even more science fictional than I thought.
But life and death do play a very significant role in this fourth volume. For some reason, a few plants begin to bud and grow indoors in this repeating day. I wondered, at that point, what would happen if someone became pregnant, or was pregnant when she entered the time loop, and sure enough, another character, Sonia, reveals she is carrying a baby. But, sadly, she loses the baby -- it just disappears.
As usual, there is a potential game-changer in the closing pages of this book, and I won't tell you what it was, except that I was thinking about something like that as I read this fourth volume. There are seven volumes in this series, as I already mentioned, and only the fifth is available in English in the US, in paperback. I'm sorely tempted to get it, but I've been reading this metaphysical adventure so far in Kindle, and I'd like to keep doing that. Amazon says the Kindle will be up this coming November, but we'll see if I can wait that long.
See also On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): The Irreducible Metaphysics of Time Loops ... (Book II): Life in the Loop Lane ... (Book III): Multiplication
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