Time​ is fake, and it is the realest thing there is. You can’t avoid the evidence, even if you aren’t looking: only four days in a year are 24 hours long; before the industrial revolution the weekend lasted until Tuesday; the day your mother dies is not the same length as the day you do your taxes. We have created seasons and years, adolescence and senescence, stories that take their meaning from their endings. And we know that our deaths will be an end to it all: no more weekends, no more taxes, no more history, mothers, seconds and hours.

A novel is a place where time can go slowly, leap forward, be reversed and repeat. In ‘Christmas Every Day’, a children’s story by William Dean Howells from 1892, a father tells his daughter ‘a moral tale’ about a girl whose wish for endless Christmas Days was granted. In 1915, Einstein declared the girl’s wish theoretically possible. Time could loop. What would that be like? Until the publication of the first book in Solvej Balle’s planned septology, On the Calculation of Volume, the serious philosophical novel of time, in the mould of Proust and Joyce, had distanced itself from the time-loop story told to children and sold to moviegoers. Balle’s serial novel takes the idea of repetition and uses it to make these ancient, impossible problems of time new again. What is astonishing about her novel is the way she makes us see that we have constructed our world so we don’t have to think about time’s scalding realities.

The day that repeats in On the Calculation of Volume is 18 November, the day Proust died. The person stuck in that day is Tara Selter, who is 29 when the story begins, though we won’t know that until Book IV. The novel starts with the entry numbered 121 in Selter’s diary, written while she is hiding in her own house listening to her husband, Thomas, as he goes about his 18 November again. The kettle boils, rain falls, shopping is put away, documents are printed. He pees. A fire is lit, and the house goes quiet. Thomas is reading. Then he goes for a walk. Tara emerges to eat and bathe, and with time to herself, she writes about 17 November. Her entries are split into small paragraph fragments, the sharded ruins of her life, and dated with the number of times the day has been repeated: #129, #136 and so on.

One of the first questions that comes to the reader’s mind in a time-loop story is why is this person stuck? What do they have to learn? Phil Connors, the weatherman played by Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (1993), is grumpy and selfish: he needs to be taught the value of being in a community. The Christmas-loving girl is greedy: she needs to learn to make do with less. What about Tara? The day before time stopped, she was in Paris, buying antiquarian books for the business she and Thomas run. She has breakfast in the hotel, visits a few dealers, calls Thomas at home to tell him which books she’s found, and visits a friend called Philip Maurel in his shop, where he sells ancient coins. The reader might notice a ripple of trouble in what Tara tells us about her marriage: they used to travel together but have stopped; their phone conversation ‘lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble’. Maurel introduces Tara to his new girlfriend, Marie. ‘They had a closeness … which reminded me of the time, five years ago, when I first met Thomas. The sudden feeling of something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other – the one person who makes everything simple – a feeling of being calmed and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.’ Time does something to love: it dulls it, makes the strangeness ordinary, even kills it. Has time stopped to help them save their marriage? Time is the way you show your love, in a sense, and so its passing could also mean more love, not less. One of the best things about Groundhog Day is that Murray gets the girl in the end, just as he thought he’d blown it.

Balle began thinking about this novel in the early 1990s. She got divorced twice in the period between beginning to imagine her world and writing it, and has said that in earlier drafts she gave more of her own experiences to Tara, but began to feel she was crowding out her creation. Tempted by autofiction, Balle resisted: she put the novel aside to disentangle herself by writing a memoir. Born in 1962 in Bovrup, Denmark, she is influenced by a Danish minimalism associated with the Forfatterskolen, the creative writing school in Copenhagen, where she studied in the late 1980s. Danish minimalism, whose hallmark is repetition, was itself influenced by the Norwegian punktroman, which is made up of many fragments like a pointillist painting. While Balle’s septology shares some of the ambition of the epic Norwegian septologies of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Jon Fosse, one of the questions she seems concerned with in Book I is not how much she can cram into a novel but how little can she get away with: will one day, one character, one house be enough?

In interviews, Balle says her life is simple too: a Danish-English son, two faraway exes, an old wooden house on the island of Ærø, her garden, her writing. According to the Law, a collection of short stories, each one governed by a particular rule drawn from fields as varied as physics and religion, was a hit in 1993. Seemingly burned by this brush with literary fame, she founded her own micropublisher, Pelagraf, to print the septology. She says she thought the book would be rejected by a mainstream publisher, but it also seems that she wanted to publish it the way she wanted to publish it. The Danish editions are bare: a plain coloured cover, no author photo, no blurbs. When she won the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2022, she was asked about the cover of Book IV. ‘This book is very beautiful,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit piss yellow, yes, but it also looks like lemon custard.’

The need to make something epic out of a handful of elements is one of the first things that strikes Tara when she realises she’s stuck and starts to discover the limits of the day. She wakes up in a hotel room in Paris, and at breakfast notices a slice of white bread falling in ‘a gently swerving descent’ from another diner’s table just as it had the previous day. That was the first sign. She calls Thomas at home in the fictional village of Clairon-sous-Bois in northern France, and it is clear from their conversation that he doesn’t remember the day they have both just lived. Two of the books she bought yesterday are missing, so she buys them again. She returns to Maurel’s shop and no one remembers her last visit. She buys a sestertius, a copper coin from the Roman Empire with Pius on the obverse side and Annona, the goddess of grain, on the reverse, as a present for Thomas. When she tells him on the phone that there is a rift in time, unease creeps into his voice, which she now thinks is almost charming: ‘It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences … That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always.’ Tara’s time loop might not be about her marriage after all, but about the existential condition we all share, the continual forgetting of the fragility of our enterprise. Some objects stay in the time loop, but others have to be convinced, through Tara sleeping near them. She has to wear a new dress for a number of days, as if she is persuading it, seducing it, before it will remain in her world.

Back in Clairon (Tara has discovered that she can travel freely), she starts to notice that what she eats does not reappear the next day, while Thomas’s food is replaced. On the afternoon of the 18th, he makes soup, pulling a leek from the garden. When she pulls one, there is one leek fewer in the world. Time is non-renewable. Her bank account fills back up, but food is gone for good, and you can’t grow a leek in a day. In Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall (1963), an invisible barrier springs up overnight around the mountain lodge the heroine is staying in, and she must learn how to live cut off from everyone, with a cow, cat and dog, and not quite enough paper to write about what’s happened. She works out how to live with reduced means, as well as the threat of no means at all. In both The Wall and On the Calculation of Volume, the vast finitude of the planet is shrunk to a domestic scale. ‘I am a monster,’ Tara thinks. ‘How long can my little world endure me?’ Just as the wonder of the improbable underwrites our lives, so does the terror of the unendurable, the world we are using up, day by day.

The first days after Tara returns to Thomas in Clairon are another honeymoon. The repeating day is also a bubble. They make love on the rug, talk about the meaning of life and the rift in time, and cook. They experiment with the limits of the day, staying up all night to see at what point the day resets. One night, they fry eggs, close to midnight. They practise noticing everything – the warming oil, the stray fleck of shell, ‘the moment when the whiteness reaches the edge of the yolk’ – until suddenly the frying pan is gone and Thomas cries out. Why is he in the kitchen? Why isn’t Tara in Paris? Does the meaning of a life lie in these details, in truly being able to see what’s there? In Sartre’s Nausea, Roquentin is sickened by a stuffed egg in an épicerie: a dark red drop on the mayonnaise reveals a vision of someone who has ‘fallen face down and was bleeding in the dishes’. To observe a thing as the phenomenologists advise might be dangerous: your love won’t know you, and your food will be tainted with blood.

Tara’s days of milk and honey do not last, because the emotional difficulty of telling Thomas every day that she is in a time loop comes to feel intolerable. She begins writing, after she discovers that paper remembers, and she starts hiding from Thomas, then living somewhere else. If she returns to Paris on what should be the next 18 November, will she be able to exit the day? She asks Thomas to go with her, but he ‘wanted to stay in his pattern. I knew it and he knew it and there was no reason to contradict him.’ She tiptoes out of their bed in the dark and makes her way to Paris.

Each of the books so far finishes on a cliffhanger like this. It’s a nod to the rom-com, sci-fi nature of time-loop stories. But as the next one begins, the cliffhanger immediately vanishes. ‘As if my 366th day marked a new beginning,’ Tara writes, at the start of Book II, recalling our January new-me delusions. But the sadness and loss of the first book has subtly dissipated: if this is life, why not just live it? It occurs to her that she could travel within Europe and find winter, spring, summer to add to her eternal autumn, constructing ‘slender, homemade’ seasons.

First, she goes home to her parents and sister in Brussels, and persuades them to have Christmas early for her. ‘Well, you know where the spare key is,’ her English mother says, ‘with a happy note in her voice’, when she finds Tara in the kitchen, as if her place in the family is eternal. Her Belgian father asks her to stay for a few more days. Her sister wants to travel with Tara, see the seasons with her. Turkey, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, bûche de Noël – though Tara is afraid the leftovers will vanish and so packs them into a cool bag which she leaves under her bed while she sleeps. The next day, after she explains again, they eat the leftovers (what was left in the fridge has vanished) and Tara’s mother buys her a new dress, telling her that she believes her daughter will find her way back to normal time. Tara thinks she can solve her time-loop problem ‘through careful listening … If you really listened. The great questions in life. Everything.’ But for her mother, a teacher, it is education that can change things, in its repeated small actions. ‘In her life,’ Tara says, ‘every day was Christmas … because every time a child was born she saw this as yet another opportunity to make the world a better place.’ Children are to be treated ‘with care, like plants’. It is for mothers to maintain the belief that time will heal, will make a newborn daughter into a woman who can deal with living in a time loop. The purpose of time is to allow the learning to take place. Tara says her goodbyes, and moves north through Bremen, Odense, Copenhagen, Malmö and Lund, to find ‘consummate winter’, then to London and Plymouth for an ‘Easter in England’ and then south to Montpellier, where she lives a ‘concentrated summer’ dancing in clubs and drinking ‘cocktails with ice cubes in them’. Time, you won’t be surprised to learn, is culturally constructed.

Balle,​ who is 63, has joked in interviews that she doesn’t think Tara Selter would enjoy hanging out with a boomer like her. But just as her English translator, Barbara J. Haveland, came out of retirement to translate the first two books then handed over the next two to a younger duo, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, so Tara has a generation-spanning quality. Balle has said that her younger readers connect her book with different ideas from the ones she was thinking of as she wrote it, with Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, for example, which contends that the first carrier bag was more important for humanity than the first axe. For Le Guin, stories can be like a bag, bringing together different sorts of thing in a single container. Perhaps women’s stories are especially like this, since we live accompanied by a bag. Sling another thing in the bag-day – Christmas, parents, a fried egg, whatever you have – and let’s see how it affects Tara. Time is a container. How much can we get in it? From its minimalist beginnings, On the Calculation of Volume gains elements: a family, a milieu, and as Tara learns how to convince them to stay, more and more objects.

After her seasonal wandering, Tara settles in Düsseldorf and finds contentment in an apartment overlooking a medlar tree. ‘Time is my backyard in afternoon sunshine,’ Tara writes. ‘My day is a container filled with a mild breeze and sunshine every day around three.’ Looking at the sestertius one day an ‘engine’ is started in her. ‘All at once,’ walking along the Rhine, ‘I felt that I knew them, the Romans.’ She begins learning about the Roman Empire, about walls and roads and amphitheatres and wheat and salt and rye:

It starts with a blank morning. A sudden awakening. I lift my laptop over onto my bed, I turn it on and my day begins. Every day the same thing happens: I key in my password only to discover that all the information I had found is gone, but that doesn’t stop me. That is just how it is. I cannot save documents or files, I have no search history because everything disappears overnight. That is how I work. I wake up in the morning. I switch on and start up. I explore the world of the Romans, I find and collect. I felt myself be led in random circles. I follow a whim, a question, a curiosity, I am led onwards, I roam around, torch in hand, lighting up corners, I lift a curtain, I blow the dust off a sentence.

It is another idea to put in the carrier bag: time is history. The repetition of this passage, which itself halts and starts again in the middle, builds to a list of comma-spliced sentences, like beads on a string. The sentences are simple, the vocabulary unpretentious. The Roman Empire, she realises, had limits in both time and space: walls at its edges and a fall that followed its rise. ‘That is what scares me,’ she writes. ‘That everything has become a container.’ When she walks around Roman sites she feels she has ‘fallen into the container and I cannot get out’. She is not carrying the bag, she is in it. As Book II ends she is continuing her research, slipping into university lecture halls, when she suddenly announces that she is waiting to meet someone in her local café. ‘His name is Henry Dale, but I didn’t know that. There was a lot more I didn’t know. That he is trapped in a November day, for example. The 18th. That I am not alone.’ Are we back in the marriage story? Really?

Henry’s first reaction to being stuck in a time loop is deeply relatable: thank God, I can finally catch up on my emails. He’s a sociologist who came to Düsseldorf from Oslo on the 16th for a conference. Trapped in time, he worked through his to-do list, until he realised his emails, his tracked changes, his phone calls had all vanished. ‘Everything would have disappeared anyway, only more slowly,’ he tells Tara. He believes that he has been ‘ejected’ from time because of the way he approached his intellectual life: learning not for itself, but for what he could instrumentalise in his next academic paper. ‘He had been an owl: silent, efficient and intent only on the prey he was about to catch.’

In Freud’s essay ‘Recollection, Repetition and Working Through’, repetition isn’t a moral issue, but a signal of repression. The analysand will unwittingly keep re-enacting a situation because they can’t get a grip on it any other way. It is the analyst’s task to point out the repetition, so that the patient can become conscious of their behaviour, and even come to act differently. Time is change. With two people now stuck in the same day, psychoanalysis is theoretically possible. But one of Henry’s ideas from his life as a sociologist is that humans succeeded because of their adaptability, what he calls ‘our abruptive capacity’, something he is now not so sure about. Time stopping might not have a moral dimension or a psychological meaning. But it might have a social meaning.

Tara’s feeling isn’t that someone has been brought to her to fall in love with, it’s that her container has burst. ‘I was interested in the Roman Empire. In the boundaries of it. Or I had been, until recently. Now the boundaries seemed to be crumbling. My horizon has broadened.’ Tara and Henry met at a lecture on the importance of grain to the Roman world; they had both attended it several times, and Tara noticed that Henry’s shirt was a different colour – those not repeating a day would always be wearing the same clothes. Her interest in the Romans makes sense to Henry: ‘For who could doubt that we live in a time which resembles theirs? That we are the Romans, heading for disaster. That the meltdown is already well under way?’ He has also noticed that what he eats is not replaced. He moves into Tara’s flat, sleeping on a sofa bed, and follows the ways she has developed to step lightly through the day: she only buys food that would have been thrown out anyway; she learns to enjoy things without owning them, ‘like wandering along country paths and plucking wildflowers with your eyes’. They make an exception on the 200th day after they met, going out for dinner to celebrate what they call their second centum.

A man and woman stuck in a time loop together – a Hollywood premise repeated in Groundhog Day, About Time (2013) and Palm Springs (2020) and so on – must fall in love. Love is the way you exit the loop, through finding, perfecting or at last deserving it. But what Tara most wants, after 1144 days of being alone, is someone to talk to. And so she and Henry talk about history: isn’t Tara fed up with it, because of its concentration on great white men? She, almost despite herself, makes a passionate argument for the interwovenness of the world: there is no Odysseus without Penelope. ‘How could we possibly know which stories had been crafted by men when everything small children heard came from women?’ she says. When Henry leaves to visit his small son in Ithaca, New York, she returns to Thomas and Clairon, and as she is about to leave France again, having failed once more to convince Thomas to come with her, she realises there are women’s stories missing. Who has heard of the prodigal daughter? Where are the stories of women about to embark on great journeys? ‘Maybe women are just alone at the exact moment they set themselves in motion.’ And she remembers her mother’s faith in her, that she will find a way, that ‘I have always done what I thought was right.’ And on the back of the sestertius, Annona, the goddess of grain. History is for men, but time is for women.

Soon, another woman in the time loop, Olga Periti, who is in her early twenties, seeks Tara out in Clairon to ask for help finding her friend Ralf Kern, who has gone missing after they argued. Could he have found a way out of the loop? They put up posters in the train stations they pass through on their way back to Henry in Düsseldorf. Olga doesn’t understand why Tara is trying to leave no trace, since she knows why she is in the loop: ‘She didn’t want to return to standard time, as she called it, without having seized the chance to change the world. She saw the repetition as an opportunity. To see things clearly. To get your fucking eyeballs polished, she said.’ She and Ralf had argued because he wanted to prevent as many accidents as he could on the 18th, and though Olga agreed, she thought the real problem was structural. When Ralf finds them, he is elated and suggests the four of them team up and form a central hub for co-ordinating information about car crashes, fires, drownings, accidental deaths that take place on the 18th, in order to intercede. ‘The act of repairing what’s broken can itself give rise to something new,’ Ralf says, ‘a tremor in the foundation, a fruitful unease, a rewiring of life, the mind, reality.’ It feels like the beginning of a new society.

On 18 Brumaire​ , Revolutionary Year Eight, Napoleon took power in Paris. Around fifty years later, in 1851, with France having returned to the Gregorian calendar, his nephew Louis-Napoleon took power in Paris, beginning a twenty-year period of authoritarian rule. ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice,’ Marx wrote in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ‘He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ This 18th is also Marx’s 18th, but perhaps reversed: from a farcical premise made for the movies, we are arriving at, if not tragedy, at least a Marx-ish reorganisation of society. This society is arranged around principles of care and repair: ideas in the novel that are associated with Tara’s mother, and now with Ralf. The book’s limits keep crumbling: On the Calculation of Volume is starting to circle ideas about our interwovenness as people, and what we owe to one another while we are stuck in this container together. If time is exhaustible, and we die at the end of it, what should we do while we’re here?

Tara, Henry, Olga and Ralf move to Bremen (where Engels once lived) and set up a sort of commune. The task is overwhelming: ‘The stream of events, the world’s faults, all the grief that no one is prepared to stem.’ By the beginning of Book IV, a society is forming. More and more people, who have seen the posters Tara, Henry and Olga put up to find Ralf, have turned up in Bremen after realising they’re not alone in the loop. They come with their stories: someone who thought she had been thrown out of time because she stole a hospital gown from work to use as a nightdress; someone who was glad the day was repeating so he could spend time with his father without his Parkinson’s disease worsening; a couple who met on the 18th and have fallen in love. The togetherness helps Tara see her role as writer and counter of days. ‘We are guests,’ she writes, ‘and when we have guests, it reminds us that everything is on loan, that we’ve been sitting on borrowed sofas and chairs, with arms and legs that are ours, belonging to bodies that are ours, and all the words and sentences, all the gestures, none of which are truly our own.’ Time is loaned.

Like Vincenzo Latronico’s Le Perfezioni, a novel inspired by Georges Perec’s nouveau roman Les Choses, strands of Balle’s work can be traced back to that mid-century French challenge to the text made out of character and incident. Latronico has said his book is better in its English translation, Perfection; Balle has joked that the English translation of her book may be its true version, because why would the Anglo-Belgian Tara write in Danish?* The novel is gloriously Schengen-y: patched together from German political philosophy, French fiction, Norwegian fragmentation. But what if all these styles were people, in one room, trying to co-ordinate their effort to save the world? They would need to decide on words for what they’d lived through, a calendar, a way of feeding everyone. And yet the Bremen house seems to work: topics for discussion are dropped into a cracked cup, and then drawn out and discussed for as long as they can manage. Olga works out how to make rolls that don’t disappear during their overnight proving, Tara bakes them in the morning and the boy just arrived from Andalusia is happy to eat the burned ones. Tara begins to say ‘we’ in her diary instead of ‘I’. No one is trying to work out how to get out of the loop any more. Instead, they are wondering whether things inside the day will grow. Someone found that potatoes forgotten at the back of a cupboard had sprouted, which they hadn’t previously thought possible. ‘If the world could be trained or coaxed or cajoled,’ someone offers, ‘why couldn’t you kick-start biology too?’ Time is life. Could a child be born into this world? A day in the life of an embryo, after all, is all the life they’ve ever known.

It took me two years to read À la recherche du temps perdu, and I’ve forgotten many parts of it already – who threw those endless dinner parties, when does Marcel’s grandmother die – but I remember what it was like to read the last volume. It was strange, like no other reading experience, an elemental whoosh where all the patched-together reading over months suddenly made sense. It was as if a novel, usually experienced sequentially, became a painting I could see all at once. I could hold the whole thing in my mind, just about, and now I had something that I could think about and with for years to come. Balle’s work has something of that quality too: from the slow, repetitive, quiet, almost depressing solo of Book I, we’ve progressed to a symphony of voices, kind, curious, various, energetic and possibly healing, in Book IV. On the Calculation of Volume is almost more fun to think with than to read – and for a novel of ideas, that’s no bad thing. There are still three more books to come (one more in Danish): let no one tell us while we’re waiting for Book V that time isn’t real.