‘On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1)’ by Solvej Balle (2020) – 161 pages          Translated from the Danish by Barbara Haveland

I wondered why this somewhat clumsily titled novel had become so popular. Then I found out it was the Groundhog Day novel.

In the movie “Groundhog Day”, Bill Murray has his Groundhog Day repeat itself over and over for comedic effect. It is a movie that is difficult not to like.

In ‘Groundhog Day’, the repeats of the day are played for laughs, for comedy. In the novel ‘On the Calculation of Volume I’, Tara Selter is very serious about the many repetitions of her day.

Wife and husband Tara and Thomas Selter run their antiquarian book buying and reselling business as T & T Selter. They specialize in 18^th century illustrated works. On a trip to Paris to buy more old books, Tara burns her hand on an old space heater. After that she finds to her horror that she is stuck in that same day, November 18.

“…everything that was going on around me was happening exactly as it had the day before, it was a replica of the day I already had stored in my memory.”

Somehow she is able to change the pattern of that day enough so that she can return home to find that her husband Thomas is not stuck in this same day. For him and everyone else the days keep advancing as always.

There are lengthy descriptions of Tara’s thoughts on her repeating day which did not, for me, make for interesting reading.

“We could discern no clear pattern and this bothered me. I wanted to find a pattern and break it but instead we discovered too many unknowns for us to comprehend the mechanics of the day. There were gray areas and unanswered questions.”

My basic problem with this phenomenon is that her husband Thomas and the rest of the world are moving on, while Tara is staying in the same day. So for Tara, Thomas is doing the same things he did on her first November 18, However Thomas himself has different events and experiences in each new day that he has. How can Thomas be in two places at the same time?

“That’s what we encountered: patterns and inconsistencies, two worlds trying to merge.”

And what about season changes. How can the seasons not change for one person while the seasons change for everybody else?

It seems to me that time can only stand still for everybody or not at all. This day repeating itself for only one person makes no sense to me.

Since the whole concept of a day repeating itself over and over for only one person while the rest of the world continues to move on from new day to new day did not make sense to me, Tara’s thoughts about this phenomenon seemed pointless and tiresome, and these thoughts were almost the entire novel.

I will not be reading the other six volumes that Solvej Balle plans to publish about this repeating day of Tara Selter.

Grade:     C-