Solvej Balle's ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME, VOLUME ONE (Tr by Barbara Haveland, Narr by Elizabeth Liang)

I have discovered something uncanny. Or at least, it is not something that I have discovered, because I already knew it, but I have discovered that it is uncanny. It's a problem that I cannot solve. There are ghosts and monsters. Thomas is the ghost, and I am the monster.

Back when I could still play video games on a console with a controller, despite the fact that my hands and arms worked perfectly well, even brilliantly (I had a triple digit typing speed with a very low error rate, a skill with which I have earned a better living than any other, to my eventual downfall), I really sucked at them. A great failure at combos, a great button masher in combat, a great repeat wanderer of labyrinthine game maps, and a greater misser of clues was I. Which meant I spent a lot of time playing scenes over and over again so as not to die, so as to pick up the object I'd missed last time that I can't progress without, so as to finally finish the fucking driving level.*

And now someone has captured exactly that experience in a prose novel. Which, quite unexpectedly, does not suck nearly as much as starting all over again for the hundredth, two hundredth, who knows how many hundredth time at the beginning of a level does. Though it tries.

I first learned about the internationally acclaimed On the Calculation of Volume, Volume One, from my dear old booksnobbing pal SJ, she of the dodisharkicorn, who was all but jumping up and down and screaming at me to read this the second she finished it. There are not many people I allow to to this to me, by the way, but when Sarajean says something is good, I add it to the TBR, and when she goes bananas like Eric Cartman at Casa Bonita about something, I prioritize it. And when that thing then goes on to make not only the long but the short list for the International Booker Prize, I know I've got to hurry up and get it before every single Booktuber I follow wrings it dry for content. Even if I have a strong feeling that I've all but read it already as it is. Which, ha ha ha...

But so, why am I talking about repeating video game levels in a post about a critically lauded novel? Because it's a novel of repetition, of course; it's everybody's favorite repetition story, Groundhog Day, or, if you're a real nerd, the Stargate SG-1 episode "Window of Opportunity."

Our heroine, whose name I've already forgotten but can't be arsed to look up and anyway it was a library book with a long waiting list, runs a very specialized antiquarian book dealership with her husband, Thomas, out of their home, and either makes enough money from this to live very comfortably in rural France, or one or both of them brought their own money. I strongly suspect the latter because she mentions that her husband inherited their cozy cottage and has never lived anywhere else. So already this is a super relatable protagonist here and, spoiler alert, I don't much care for her because she's also very boring. But anyway...

As what passes for events start unfolding, she is on a business trip to Paris and has had a pleasantly successful visit, finding several books that fit her very specific rubric and reconnecting with an old friend who runs a beautiful Parisian antiques shop with his brand shiny new girlfriend with whom we at first are led to think there might be some conflict but no, everything is lovely and they have a perfect evening with the exception of a small mishap that leaves our heroine with a slightly burned hand that will become a touchstone through what follows. Touchburn, I guess?

The next morning, she discovers that she is living the exact same day over again. She is not herself compelled to repeat the previous day's actions but everything else around her happens exactly as it did the day before. She spends a few days in Paris trying to test out just how faithfully the rest of the world is repeating itself before deciding to head home and see if her husband can help her figure all this out.

The next chunk of the novel finds her growing increasingly frustrated with her situation and her husband, who never flat out disbelieves her or treats her like she's crazy (again, no conflict is allowed), and does try to help her, but has to have everything explained to him every single day, when he wakes up (mostly) pleasantly surprised to find her home a day early. And she starts to understand that not only is he not going to be much help, but that they are drifting farther and farther apart even as they share meals and make plans and have sex; from her perspective, time is moving forward and she is keeping track of how many times she has repeated this same date (November 18) and sometime during the night he forgets everything they've said and done. From his, it's just another day with his nice wife in his nice life and tomorrow will be another (that she might never see?) one. If this persists for a long enough time, the reader realizes, though she never verbalizes this, she will age while he will not, she will change and he'll stay the same. 

Tara. Her name is Tara. Yes.

Much is made in reviews of this series, which will eventually comprise seven volumes, of how sad and tragic this is, and Solvej Balle her translator, Barbara Haveland, and the almost farcically even keeled narrator, Elizabeth Liang, convey this simply and beautifully, even as our heroine retreats physically from her coexistence with this "ghost" of her husband, moving herself into their guest room and, having long ago memorized her husband's path through his day well enough to predict it, minute by minute, avoiding him altogether while she tallies up hundreds of days and performs half-hearted little experiments to determine the parameters of her imprisonment in time. And comes to think of herself as the monster, secretly sharing her husband's house and consuming its resources.

What keeps this narrative even remotely interesting is the aforementioned parameters of this time loop. The burn on her hand heals a little bit more each day until it's a faint scar; even though it happened in Paris, where she no longer is, from contact with a heater she only touched on the very first November 18th but never even went near on any of the subsequent subjective days. The books she bought in Paris had disappeared when she awakened on Day Two, forcing her to return to the shops where she bought them, but then on Day Three and onward they (mostly) persisted in her possession. But a gift that she bought in Paris and gave to her husband is gone the next day, from her perspective, and, of course, never existed, from his.

Most importantly for her long-term existence, any food she consumes is removed from the universe forever; anything she, for instance, buys from a shop and then eats, will no longer be for sale in that shop on subsequent days, even though in every other way said shop will be identical and the people in it behaving identically unless interacting directly with her. And anything she eats from the pantry or fridge at the cottage will also disappear. Sooner or later there will be nothing left in her village and she will have to go further afield.

So it's really just the mystery of what's going on and how she's going to figure this out that provides any story at all. I mean, eventually she's going to encounter at least a small level of privation in the next six books once she's eaten herself out of her location, but otherwise...? As averse as Balle has been to introducing any drama apart from our heroine's admittedly touching, weary sadness, I can't count on that, though 

One thing that did enchant and intrigue me, though, was an allusion to Adolfo Bioy Casares' uncanny and haunting novella, The Invention of Morel: not only is her friend in Paris surnamed Morel, but there is in the back room of his store a hint of a mysterious device that has the potential to be the key to Tara's entire plight. We only get a tantalizing glimpse of this possibility in this first volume. It is this and only this that truly draws my curiosity toward its sequels.

For otherwise, I have to ask myself, am I up to spending six more novels with this boring, privileged character, who only sort of seems to love her husband (seriously, the way she describes their relationship, even when they're boning, is a snooze) and never gets excited about anything and never even shows any emotion but sadness-about-being-parted-from-Thomas? I'm really not sure. I mean, she's not gonna be golfing into a wormhole anyone soon, iykwim. Still, I might give Volume Two of The Calculation of Volume a chance sometime, because I am still intrigued by the overall situation.

But then again, I could just let the Internet or SJ spoil this for me and move on to all the other shinies still on my TBR. A new set of Internet friends and fellow lovers of what the wags are calling "high brodernism" have convinced me that it's time to read Miss Macintosh, My Darling, which I peeked at and was immediately captivated in a way I wasn't with this, so, you know. 

At least On the Calculation of Volume, Volume One, was short.

*Seriously, had they really been a thing back then, I could have had the worst Let's Play channel on all of YouTube. They'd have maybe paid me not to play!