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!

Olga Ravn's THE EMPLOYEES (Tr Martin Aiken)

I know you say I'm not a prisoner here, but the objects have told me otherwise. - Statement 021

I really, really wonder if Olga Ravn is a fan of some of the same weirdass international cinema that I am, because this novel made me think of some of the strangest films I've seen. It's even, kind of, structured like they are, its narrative decidedly non-linear and divided into little vignettes we're left to ponder, rearrange, connect for ourselves into something that feels meaningful enough to be a story.

In the case of The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 23rd Century, what we are given is a collection of statements from workers on a spaceship called the Six Thousand (six thousand of what, we are left to ponder) that has taken on a collection of not-entirely-inanimate objects found on a planet on the ship's route to an unspecified destination. The statements chiefly concern the emotional effects the various objects have on the members of the crew, and appear to maybe be a sort of threat assessment, or at least to be trying to tease out what idiosyncrasies each employee, of which there are some who were born, some who were created, some who will die, and some who will never die,  has that make them more or less susceptible to these effects. 

From the very start The Employees had me thinking of visuals from some of the weirdest bits of fantasy filmmaking I've yet encountered; the first "statement," for instance,  has an employee talking about a large machine they regard as female. The employee is responsible for cleaning it and mentions that "One day she laid an egg." Immediately I was reminded of one of the more perverse scenes in Alejandro Jodorowsky's feature-length freak-out, The Holy Mountain and of course I'm talking about "The Love Machine." 

Simultaneously I also thought of the weird alien bio-contraptions in Katsuhito Ishii's Funky Forest: The First Contact -- especially once I encountered this passage:

Despite your numbering system, which I personally find reasonable indeed, I can inform you that the crew employs countless unofficial names for the objects, some more improper than others. Examples include: the Reverse Strap-On, the Gift, the Dog, the Half-Naked Bean... My own impression is that this idiosyncratic naming process is an indication that crew members feel a need to appropriate these objects in their own way, reducing the distance between crew member and object, and establishing a form of intimacy, so to speak. It's my assumption that naming in this way renders the object harmless, scaling down its strangeness and assimilating it into a reality the individual crew member can both relate to and accept, thereby facilitating coexistence with the found objects.

For illustrative purposes, here are some stills from Funky Forest, a film I still feel that not enough of you have given the chance it deserves. This first image, could it not indeed be the Reverse Strap-On? Or perhaps a parent producing a whole new generation of Reverse Strap-Ons?

This second still doesn't really fit any of the names described in the passage above, but in its Cronenbergian intimacy between a strange machine and a person, it uniquely depicts visually the kind of relationship some of the Employees have to the objects on board the generation ship.

If you someday find out that a certain cute house on a certain cute street in Casper, WY was mysteriously stricken by bolts of pure fury and burnt to a cinder, you might later learn that Olga Ravn is not, in fact, a fan of either of these films and is deeply offended by my comparisons. But then again, you might not.

One might also consider the sub-genre that shows up more in TV and video games of "mundane objects imbued somehow with weird/supernatural powers or properies" like The Lost Room, Warehouse 13, or Remedy's magnificent video game, Control. Since the objects under discussion seem, most of them, to be at least partly alive, though, I go for the Funky Forest imagery.

Another work of art The Employees brought strongly to mind as I read it is something Ravn might find a more flattering one to be compared to: the epic poem by Nobel Laureate Harry Nilsson and the 2018 film adapted from it, Aniara, which features a technology that swamps the entire sensoria of passengers on an accidental generation ship with detailed recordings of natural scenes of Earth that was. It's only when this artificial nostalgia machine finally burns out that the passengers finally face the reality of their fate and go mad from existential dread. This doesn't quite happen aboard the ship in The Employees, but it always feels like a possibility as many workers express longings for scenes and experiences in the natural world of Earth that are no longer available to them, and reveal that they have sort of incorporated some of the more evocative objects into their fantasies of walking through a forest or sitting by a babbling brook.

Those of us from Earth, we can hardly talk to each other. We're weighed down with memories of where we came from and what we left behind. Seeing the others on the ship, speaking to them, all it does is make me unhappy.

While most of the statements give us little glimpses of life with the objects, some invite us to ponder other matters, as when an employee who is evidently of the "created" category wonders just how meaningful that status really is:

I know I'm only humanoid and that it's not the same. But I look like a human, and feel the way humans do. I consist of the same parts. Perhaps all that's needed is for you to change my status in your documents? Is it a question of name? Could I be human if you called me one?

In an age where some of us seem to be agitating for up to (or maybe even more than; it all depends on how bigoted one is) half of us to lose our status as fully human, this bit hits pretty damned hard, as I'm sure it was meant to. 

It hits even harder in a statement or so later, when another -- or possibly the same* -- employee tells us "You can't cry, you're not programmed to cry" in response to the employee's reaction to the news that they will be allocated less time with their human co-workers : and that you want me to stay with my kind." One now wonders -- are these four categories of worker inherent in the individuals' beings, or assigned/imposed by Authority? Is the difference between those who will die and those who will never die that some are functionally immortal, or that they've been artificially designated for their fates?

As is probably inevitable with a storytelling structure like this one, we finish The Employees with possibly more questions than we started with. What happened to the Earth? What does the Employer want with the objects? Is the distinction between humans and humanoids even real (one of the few questions that kind of get answered, but only kind of)? Is this actually a meaningful mission, or just an experiment to see how much people will put up with? What are the objects? What's the deal with Cadet 04? What the hell happened in the canteen? Who was Dr. Lund and where is he now? Is he the speaker in Statement 160?

When does Tadanobu Asano show up?

Olga Ravn, you've got my attention. 

*The statements themselves are given unique individual numbers, presented in sequence but not in their original entirety (some numbers are missing) but the employees aren't.