A lingering, thoughtful take on the human experience of living through a time loop
Published in 2024 in the US but 2025 in the UK, the first installation of Solvej Balle's series, translated from Danish by Barbara Haveland, is a strange old book. The protagonist, Tara Selter, is trapped in a time loop. She relives the 18th of November over and over again, recording in her notes - which appear to be the text we are reading - the events of the many iterations that only she remembers, over the course of a full year of experiential time.
It is not a particularly unusual day. Tara works - with her husband - in the antique books trade, and in the first iteration of the day, before anything unusual happens, she spends the day in Paris buying books, chatting to other buyers and sellers, and meeting up with an old friend and his new girlfriend. It is a good day, but not a strange one, with no precipitating incident or obvious inception point. We only read about this unextraordinary day after knowing about the premise - Tara is up front with her situation in her notes before looping back to what led to her predicament, because why wouldn't she be? These are her notes, and she already knows what she experienced. But even when looking back at the original 18th of November, with the benefit of hindsight, there is no foreshadowing, no suggestion of some malevolent force that has brought about this unthinkable intrusion of unreality into Tara's world.
And that is, in many ways, the core of the story I want to linger on. This is not a book about an easily solvable problem. It doesn't follow Tara as she pulls together the clues and the science to reverse this and make her way back to the normal flow of time. She tries - of course she tries - to figure out a pattern to the events. But she's no scientist, and there is no pattern she can see. Her attempts to understand the problem slowly turn into - very human - irrational pattern seeking and superstitious belief by the end of the volume. This is not a story about a grand adventure against the odds. Instead, it's a story about her experience of this inexplicable event.
On the face of it, that experience is a whole lot of not very much. It's the day to day of surviving. It's the progression of the decision of whether she tells her husband every day what's happened, and pulls him into trying to solve it or not. It's the slow decrease in available food in the house and nearby supermarket as she continues through her year. It's looking up at the vastness of the sky at night and feeling like your smallness in the world means that all this - whatever it is - can't be permanent in unsolvable. It's bird song and peeing in the garden and walking and just the very granular daily experience of her life in this situation. And, as such, it is full of her feelings and musings, more than anything else. No, however much you're thinking, more than that. This is a phenomenally insular, introspective book.
Luckily, Tara is an interesting character in whose mind to sit, and more critically, Balle and Haveland have a really good line in prose that makes those mundane moments sing. I've already mentioned the stars, but I think that scene really does epitomise what this book is truly good at. Tara has been feeling very concerned about her impact on the world around her, and about how utterly unsolvable this problem seems. She worries, as she realises her repeated trips to the supermarket are depleting the food stocks despite the recurrence of the day, that over time she is just going to deplete a wider and wider field of resources, becoming some awful monster - her word - that impacts the world around her without its knowledge. Then one night she goes out into the garden in the dark, wrapped in her duvet, and looks up at the night sky. In her musing on the vastness of it all, she finds some measure of peace in her insignificance, and a quiet belief that it can't all be irreparable, if she is so small.
As it happens, that feeling doesn't last, but that doesn't even really matter. Its significance is in the experience of it, the zooming into a small moment of time and sitting with a person and their very real feelings about an impossible thing they're living through.
I find this is an under-represented approach in SFF - at least in the mainstream modern SFF I mostly consume - to its detriment. We are rich in stories about solving problems, action and plot driven explorations of what if. But there have been a few stories I've come across recently that take those what ifs and those ideas, and ask instead - what would it really be like to live through them? It comes through in Julia Armfield's Private Rites, it is a strong aspect of Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time and it is deeply embedded here. The core idea at their heart may not be new - climate change, time travel and time loops are all established SFF tropes - but what makes them feel fresh is their approach from the experiential end. As someone very interested in people, and in seeing human experience at a granular level in fiction, this is so refreshing. Because it would be absolutely boggling to live through any of the events in any of those books. How would one cope? Asking that question is, to me, just as critical as asking about the science, the ideas, the solution to the puzzle, and if anything more so for its relative absence in the field.
The answer, here at least, is that Tara increasingly doesn't cope. She initially is pulled towards her husband, wanting to work with him to face this, but over the passage of her experiential time, finds the gap between them widening too far for her to cross day after day. She hides from him but stays close, at first, and then widens the gap between them as she feels their psychological gap widening. Fewer and fewer other people make themselves known in the narrative as the number of days of the time loop rack up, and as she pulls in tighter and tighter to herself, losing her sense of the normal rhythms of the world. And all of this, she notices and narrates; she is nothing if not a self-aware protagonist. But this too feels a reflex of the situation she finds herself in - she has no one to talk to about this but herself, in her notes, and so all of that ruminative approach is her act of trying to deal with the inexplicable bearing down on her.
There's a lot in here about isolation, and how that would affect a person, done with realism and sensitivity. It is impossible not to feel for her, not to pause in those cold, empty rooms, in those quiet days, and feel the very mundane but real melancholy of it. The great tragedy of this temporal incident is how much it cuts her off from the people closest to her, quite literally. For a day whose first iteration is full of warmth and friendship, it becomes incredibly stark and bleak.
This isolation also plays into something that feels a little underexplored in SF texts - at least in my experience - the realities of how much someone would or would not believe the fantastical when it happens to them in their life. Often, a character will accept easily because it is simply expedient to the story that they do so - if it's a plot and action driven narrative, you need to get the character past the blocker that impedes the narrative from happening. Or perhaps it's a story that wants to subvert that, and has a character refusing to believe what's in front of them while it continues to unfold. Tara is neither of these. She believes relatively easily, and based off the smallest of details. The first time the repetition unfolded, the thing that caught her attention was a fellow traveller at her Paris hotel dropping a croissant at breakfast in just precisely the same way as the previous day. Alone, it wasn't enough for her to fully understand and believe, but it sparked the thought that leads her to finally understanding. Does that seem too easy? Maybe... except when you are so embedded in the narration of her experience. It turns out, the speed of her acceptance isn't the thing, it's instead being able to fully grasp the little emotional pieces that go into it. Because the narrative is so concerned with her interiority, with narrating her thoughts in detail, it becomes very easy to see why she accepts it when she does, because we effectively experience that thought process with her.
By not just blurring but removing - as much as possible - the boundary between the reader and the character, Balle has created an incredibly moving and rich text that addresses key emotional questions about the experience of the impossible. If your calculus works that way, yes it comes at the cost of plot (and indeed, resolution - this is the first volume of a planned seven, the first sequel of which is already available in English) - this is not a story in which a great deal of significant events happen - but I believe that what it offers instead is not only worth that sacrifice, but sidesteps the idea of it as a sacrifice entirely. It is a wholly different text, with different concerns, approaching an SFnal problem from an unusual angle, and enriching the genre as a whole by so doing. If you are interested in human experience, in character, and in the quiet melancholy of a single person's thought, this is a book that will absolutely deliver that, along with a thoughtful approach to an SFnal problem.
Balle sings an ode to the intimate quiet of personal reflection in the hardest of times, and to the pain of isolation. I would definitely encourage you to listen.
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The Math
Highlights: beautiful prose and translation, interesting approach to the human aspect of the SFnal, granular and poignant interiority
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10
Reference: Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume [Faber & Faber, 2025]. Translated by Barbara Haveland.
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
