Someone once told me that it’s “easy” to read “War and Peace”. The big Russian novel, famed for its length and complexity, is apparently split into 365 chapters. You commit to reading one chapter per day and after a year you can have the cachet of joining the War and Peace reader’s club. I’m not currently a member of this club.

In “On The Calculation of Volume” by Solvej Balle, translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland, the narrator-protagonist is living the same day over and over again, “Groundhog Day”-style. Just as in the feelgood (eventually) Bill Murray movie, no one else is repeating the day. It’s November 18th, so no, there are no groundhogs involved at all. The narrator quickly cottons on to what is happening, and even though this is a serious novel where the repetition obviously has some deep philosophical meaning (or does it?), she manages to have some fun with things. Back to that later.

At the time of writing this post about Book I, six parts out of a planned seven have been published in the original Danish. The English translation of Book V is out in the UK next week. I’ve already started Book II and also have Book III on my shelf because of the free shipping when you spend £25 or more at the Waterstones website.

The mooted seven part structure and, dare I say it, the rather close record of daily experience afforded by the narrative, suggests yet another comparison, with Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu”. From what I’ve read of “The Way by Swann’s” - three years and counting - I can see why the allusions would be made. We should be pedantic though and note that while “On the Calculation of Volume” is planned to be seven books, Proust’s work is seven volumes each of which consists of multiple books. (Did I go back and change all my references to volumes to books when I noticed how confusing the titles were? Yes, I did.)

Anyway, I feel like this post has been all comparisons so far and not a lot of description. Tara Selter lives in a French village with her husband Thomas, they run a business together that finds and sells antique books. The day before the repeating day, Tara is in Paris attending meetings and looking for books. On the eighteenth, she wakes up, has breakfast, goes to more meetings, makes purchases, and catches up with old friends for dinner. While there she burns her hand on a heater. She goes back to the hotel, calls Thomas on the phone to discuss her day, and goes to bed.

The ’next’ morning, Tara works out pretty quickly that it is in fact the ‘yesterday’ that she has already lived through. The newspapers are the same and someone drops toast on the breakfast room floor in the exact same way as ‘yesterday’. Would this be more or less pronounced if you were looking at your phone? Isn’t it funny how schadenfreude sears things into our memories? At any rate, Tara also notices that there are changes: she still has the burn on her hand and she still has some of the books that she purchased.

And so in Book I Tara explores the new repeating world she finds herself in and tries to establish the rules of that world. She wakes up where she goes to sleep, so she can travel: she doesn’t have to endlessly wake up to “I Got You Babe”. Things that are near her when she goes to sleep are there when she wakes up, so she can keep track of her days in a notebook. Talking of the fun I mentioned earlier, she returns to Thomas and they experiment with what he can remember (spoiler: nothing) and what happens if Tara just stays awake… Not quite learning to carve a swan out of a block of ice though.

The novel is laid out without chapters, just headings that indicate the number of repetitions Tara has experienced. The book begins in media res on repetition 121 and runs up to repetition 366. This is the point where Tara realises that things won’t reset and progress again just because she has done a year’s worth of repetitions. This was what made me start with the anecdote about reading “War and Peace”. It might seem heavy, but because there are skipped days, it would take you a lot less than a year to read Book I using the “War and Peace” method.

I’m intrigued as to how the series will develop. The writing is very flat and simple, though it does stick with the single perspective very well. It also ranges through emotions as Tara tries to figure out her perplexing situation. I’m not sure enough has happened to say much more about it stylistically, and if I were to do that, I think I would spoil a lot of what happens. Perhaps I will feel braver (and know more) after Book II. If you’ve read this (or Proust!), maybe send me a message from the contact page!