ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME

Our narrator, stuck in place temporally, looks for a change in scenery.

The first book in this seven-volume novel series introduced readers to Tara Selter, a bookseller who has mysteriously been forced to relive November 18th over and over. In that book, Tara chronicled her sometimes desperate efforts to recruit her husband for clues about the rationale behind her predicament. As the second book opens, a year of reliving the same day with no explanation hasn’t exactly defeated Tara, but she’s listless: “I have no pattern of sounds and silence around which to organize my day, I have no plans, I have no calendar.” And no changing seasons, either—the bulk of the book chronicles Tara’s efforts to travel across Europe to capture the sensations of winter, summer, and spring that reliving the same day has denied her. From France, she heads to her native Belgium, where she visits her family, then heads to Norway for winter, London for a sense of a rainy spring, southern France for a whiff of summer. After two years of traveling, she settles in Dusseldorf, Germany, where she sinks into a fall-like contemplation of her next move. A cliffhanger ending suggests an accelerating plot in the coming books, but here Tara’s situation is more an opportunity for Balle to consider how much our identity is tied to sensory details and our sense of time’s passage: “I want the cold and dark of winter, not just a single day of showers and chilly sunlight, not just mild days with rain and more rain, not just gray skies and a nip in the air.” Tara contemplates this intellectually: An ancient Roman coin she carries with her is a symbol of history, boundaries, and mortality, but Haveland’s translation also captures the twitchy urge to both keep moving and seek the comforts of home.

A speculative, lyrical study of our sensory self.