"Without the concept of time, the fundamental principles of human experience-death, life, love, loss-could not exist, hence literature could not exist. A single day in London, kicked off by the need for flowers for a party, can unspool a narrative that moves both forward and backward to address the melancholy passage of time itself; or, alternately, a man may choose to visit a sanatorium for three weeks and leave seven years later, losing all sense of time's passage."
"This is the question animating Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, a septology of novels told from the vantage point of Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller forced to live through the same day, November 18, over and over again. Balle, a heavyweight in the Danish literary world since the late 1980s, has said in interviews that she came up with the idea of Calculation in 1987, six years before Groundhog Day popularized the trope of a person stuck in time."
Time underpins death, life, love and loss and thus enables literature by structuring human experience and narrative. Different narrative forms arise from specific interactions of time and space, a concept framed by the chronotope, where time thickens and space responds to movements of plot and history. The books center on Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller compelled to relive November 18 repeatedly, exploring how repetition, stalled chronology and temporal collapse affect memory, identity and meaning. The work engages experimental, cyclical temporality and reflects precedents in popular and theoretical treatments of time in fiction.
Read at The Nation
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