You Can Go Home Again, and Again, and Again

Cory Oldweiler reviews the new translation of Danish author Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume (Book III).”

By Cory OldweilerNovember 18, 2025

• Fiction

• SF

TIME-TRAVEL STORIES are intrinsically tricky, almost guaranteed to create paradoxes, like what if the time traveler winds up preventing their own existence or somehow causing the very thing they are attempting to prevent? Time-loop stories, by contrast, are relatively straightforward and almost playful. In the most popular varieties, the person stuck in time can do pretty much whatever they want or need to do until the time loop resets itself and everything goes back to where it started. Life in such situations has no permanent consequences, and the time loop functions mainly as a means for the protagonist to figure out how to get themselves unstuck.

But not all time loops play by these familiar rules. On the Calculation of Volume is the English-language title of Danish author Solvej Balle’s Om udregning af rumfang, a slowly unspooling time-loop septology. The first two parts of the novel, published in Barbara Haveland’s English-language translation in November 2024, quickly established a deeply complex world rich with storytelling potential. The novel follows antique bookseller Tara Selter, who is on a business trip in Paris when she wakes up on November 19 only to notice that the same person in her hotel dining room drops a piece of bread at the same spot they did the prior morning. Tara soon discovers that it is once again November 18, and over the next 1144 days, covered in the first two parts of the novel, she remains trapped in time by herself. But unlike, say, a film such as Groundhog Day (1993), when time resets for everyone, Tara does not go back to where she was on the morning of November 18. She alone can move through the world, while everything around her is stuck on repeat and unaware of the time loop.

After attempting to sort out her situation in Paris, Tara returns home to her husband, Thomas, in Northern France and explains to him what has happened, a process she repeats with some variation every morning when he awakens to see her lying next to him, having—in his mind—returned from Paris early. Eventually, their attempts to live out of sync get to be too much and she moves into their guest room, using his unvarying routine to allow her to sneak around unnoticed. He thinks she is in Paris, while she only uses the kitchen when he is out of the house. When he is at home, she sits quietly and listens to the man she loves go about his day, knowing that he won’t walk into the guest room because that is not something he does on November 18.

While Balle builds her story on the back of this repetition, Tara eventually starts to head out for other places, partly driven by necessity, because one of the most interesting rules of this world is that some of the things Tara consumes don’t replenish themselves when time resets. For example, the shelves in the local grocery store start to get depleted of the tinned fish or crispbread that she favors, leading her to feel like a monster devouring the world. She moves to other locations and finds empty homes to sleep in, but again, because of the way this world works, she can also return to Paris and reoccupy her same hotel room since, on November 18, that is still her room.

For the first two parts of the novel, Tara remains wedded to her old way of measuring time, counting iterations of November 18 as a way of marking the passage of years. Consequently, on day 401 in part two of the novel, Tara visits her parents in Brussels because she wants to celebrate “Christmas” with them. To her family, it is November 18, but Tara is ready for some holiday spirit. After that, she even tries to recapture the changing of the seasons that her body is still craving by traveling up into northern Scandinavia for her “winter,” then down to the south of France to chase “summer,” all while never straying from November 18 on the calendar. And through it all, she does a lot of thinking about why she is temporally where she is and what she must do to tolerate and escape the situation.

The third book of On the Calculation of Volume is now available in English, and while the date is still November 18, a surprising number of things have changed, starting with the fact that Tara is no longer alone. As expected, Henry Dale, who appears on the last page of Book II, has fallen into the same “container of time” where Tara is stuck. And the scale of Balle’s project has expanded as well. Back on day 151 in Book I, Tara consoled herself that “it is merely time that is broken,” but on day 1668, near the end of Book III, she and Henry discuss “what to do about a world that is broken.” Book III even has new English-language translators, with Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell seamlessly succeeding Haveland, though the new duo of Smith and Russell use a few more semicolons and a lot more em dashes. And Smith and Russell have continued the novel’s list of honorifics too, with Book III being named a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature just months after Haveland’s translation of Book I was short-listed for the International Booker Prize.

Really, the only thing that hasn’t changed much over the first three books, besides that reduplicating date, is Tara herself, whose continued perplexity she sums up at the end of the latest book by saying “I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I wouldn’t know what to say if anyone asked.” For most of Book III, Tara’s primary concern remains what it was in Book I—namely, her husband Thomas. It’s unsurprising that she would strive to remain connected to her partner no matter the obstacles, but the task has been made much more difficult by the continuing passage of time from her perspective. While we don’t know how old Tara is, Book I tells readers that she met Thomas five years before she got stuck on November 18—meaning that, by the time she returns to their Clairon-sous-Bois home on day 1531 in Book III, the two have been apart for nearly as long as they knew each other prior to their temporal schism. Her seeming lack of character development can be a bit frustrating, but is likely at least partially a consequence of assessing the seven-part novel before it is even halfway finished.

One of my favorite themes of Book I is the way Balle seems to liken the chronological distance between Tara and Thomas to the way that dementia or just the general forgetfulness of aging can start to come between two people. Each new day, Tara has to explain to Thomas why she is home, offering proof in the form of prognostication (it will start raining in x minutes); only then can they start to diagnose some way of overcoming their situation or coping with their shocking new circumstances. In Book III, Tara is recapping more than four years of her life every day, making it much more challenging for her to bring up to speed the “forgetful” Thomas, for whom no time has passed. And he finally does become skeptical, or at least hesitant, about these increasingly elaborate daily explications, in scenes that are heartbreaking to read.

Tara’s return visit in the new book starts exactly the same way her prior visits did, and for 67 November 18s she tries what she already knows will not work, though this time she characterizes it slightly differently, admitting to herself that “every morning [she] altered his mood.” She also begins to lie to Thomas in her efforts to cajole him into comprehending their predicament. A “process of erasure” has begun, however, and so, just like the other times she has tried and failed to live out of sync with her husband, she again retreats to the guest room and starts to “skulk,” becoming over the next 100 days much more of a stalker or specter than she ever was on past visits. I doubt Thomas has made his last appearance in the novel, but I hope that Balle has something else in mind for the next time Tara tries to go home again.

Tara only returns to Thomas in Book III after a year that is spent mostly in the—platonic, it should be said—company of Henry, who moves in with her in Düsseldorf, Germany, shortly after they establish that they are stuck in the same temporal boat. Henry is Norwegian, and was 37 years old when he fell into November 18. He has generally reached the same conclusions about the day’s seemingly random and unreliable rules governing object retention, consumption, and whatnot, but he has more definitively abandoned any hope in the eventual arrival of November 19, content to “accept one’s losses” and “live with the repetition.” His resignation partly stems from his profession as a sociologist studying humanity’s “abruptive capacity”—that “distinctly human […] ability to sever ties with the past and chart an entirely new course.” The aptness of his research, combined with Tara’s interest in antique books, makes me wonder whether Balle is setting up a world where each person who is stuck in time will have a specific part to play in processing—or remedying—the disconnected past.

After 200 days living together, Tara and Henry both feel something is missing in their lives and go their separate ways, with the promise of staying in touch. That’s when she returns to Thomas, while Henry heads for Ithaca, New York, where his ex-wife and five-year-old son live. It’s his fifth visit to the United States since he got trapped in November 18, and while his repeated returns are, like Tara’s, understandable, they also raise logistical questions. The reader’s perspective never leaves Tara, so we don’t get much insight into the specifics of Henry’s activities in New York, but we are told that he starts each day by phoning his ex and giving her some variation of “I told you I was coming but my email must have gotten lost,” leading her to grant him permission to pull their son out of school and spend the day with him. While this alleviates the need Tara has to summarize her entire yearslong experience each morning, it’s hard to understand how Henry spends months and months with his son without ever referring to anything they have discussed on the days before, information that—from his son’s perspective—he isn’t supposed to know.

The first three parts of the novel have demonstrated that Balle loves an out-of-the-blue, game-changing concluding chapter, so it would be folly to try and predict where the story will end up, but Book III does make a bit clearer which themes might be important, starting with sustainability. Henry shares Tara’s belief that they are “living in a world that can’t sustain itself for much longer,” and she slowly co-opts him into her regimen of largely subsisting on “garbage”—that is, food that will soon go bad. The Roman Empire, a fascination for Tara introduced in Book II, returns as well. The Roman storyline in Book III centers on the empire’s use of wheat instead of rye, which is more straightforward than Tara’s Book II musings about containers, although that metaphor is clearly not going away since “volume” is in the title of the novel. Book III positions time more as a container, as opposed to the geographical or functional containers of Book II, which is an intriguing shift, though Tara does also posit that “things […] set the world in motion” rather than actual historical events, raising the possibility that the sestertius coin, which continues to linger from Book I, will emerge as some sort of talisman.

Another new theme, made possible by the fact that Tara finally has other people to talk to within her timeline, is the idea of fractured communication. She and Thomas find themselves increasingly unable to communicate, but she and Henry are generally able to do so despite speaking different languages, relying on English, German, or French. Even though they “don’t always use exactly the same words […] the words are accurate enough.” Late in the novel, Tara also starts to “borrow” the words of another character because “there [i]s so little language left” in her own mind. Tara and Henry even begin to create their own language. Having abandoned her desire to mark the passage of time via the conventional rubric of four seasons, Tara joins Henry in choosing to measure time in 100-day spans they call “centia,” the plural of centium. How much will those individuals stuck in November 18 have to adapt their language in order to move forward with their lives, or forward in time?

The biggest change by the end of Book III is an almost existential one, with Tara, Henry, and some other new faces, whom I’ll let Balle introduce, trying to decide whether it is better to do no harm and leave no trace (as Tara and Henry have by lurking in the shadows and eating mainly “garbage”) or to try to change the world and therefore greet any eventual November 19—if it ever comes—with the knowledge that you did everything you possibly could to make the world a better place. Fixing the past is hardly a groundbreaking concept for a time-loop story, but the scale being discussed by Balle’s protagonists at the end of Book III seems much larger than most such tales. It’s anyone’s guess when Anglophones will be able to finish reading the complete On the Calculation of Volume since part six was just published in Danish this past August, but if Balle is going to focus on “how to prepare yourself to wake up,” I’m willing to wait for as many November 18s as it takes.