ByFaith invited writers to select a novel to review that our readers might consider for their summer reading lists.

Last fall, a bookish friend of mine mentioned an item on her Christmas list: it was “On the Calculation of Volume I,” by Danish author Solvej Balle. “It’s the first book in a septology,” she said, “and it’s like ‘Groundhog Day.’ The protagonist is reliving the same day.” 

I admit that the prospect of seven volumes of Bill Murray-esque absurdity, transposed into a bleak Nordic key did not appeal to me. But, this friend of mine is brilliant and original — the kind of person I would like to be — so, naturally, I feigned interest. Hypocrite that I am, I went as far as purchasing the book, and, in a bid to impress, I read it. 

Some of the best reading I’ve done in my life has been motivated by selfish ambition and vain conceit. As an undergraduate English major, I labored through Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” and Maturin’s “Melmoth the Wanderer” not because I particularly enjoyed them, nor because I was genuinely curious, but because I craved good grades and the adulation of my professors and peers. God, it seems, can redeem even this kind of reading. Going through the motions with difficult texts enhanced my powers of attention and comprehension, and expanded my capacity for delight. Without meaning to, I learned to enjoy new things, and even to relish the labor of cultivating such taste.

I am now an English professor myself, but I still require coercion to read new things. When I’m not reading the 19th-century British literature in which I specialize, or keeping up with scholarship, I tend to fall back on pulpy detective fiction or my favorite Inklings novels. I’m not really the kind of person who gravitates to heady speculative fiction, but a petty desire to be perceived as such by a woman I admire led me, providentially, to this astonishing book, which I have since foisted on several other friends, and now intend to foist on you.

I might begin my campaign by mentioning the critical laudations the series has garnered. The first three volumes won the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2022, and Volume I was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025. Balle has now published six of the seven installments, and as of April, the first four are available in English. A recent New York Times review dubbed the series a “category-destroying mega-novel.” 

Despite all this clamor about innovation, however, “On the Calculation of Volume I” employs a tried and true narratorial device: that of the “found manuscript” — in this case, Tara Selter’s diary, in which she documents the 18th of November more than 300 times. 

The novel begins on repeat #121, and Tara opens her journal by observing, “There is someone in the house.” 

What ensues immediately upends readerly expectations (something at which Balle excels), because this “someone” is not, in fact, a home invader. It is Tara’s husband, Thomas, who goes about his 18th of November in an established pattern that Tara can now anticipate down to the second. Because she was on a business trip to Paris on the original 18th of November, Thomas is unaware that Tara has taken up residence in the guest room, where she ekes out a separate, hidden life, carefully timing her movements to his comings and goings. Regarding their marital alienation, Tara reflects, “time has come between us.”

Readers are, in effect, thrust into the uncanny headspace of a woman who has already endured more than a hundred torturous replays of November 18th, including early days in which she, again and again, explained her plight to Thomas and together they researched, read, and experimented, all to no avail. 

Unlike triumphalist science fiction, in which ingenious humans overcome their own existential crises, Balle offers no explanation for Tara’s predicament and no predictable rules governing her movement through it. 

For instance, objects she collects over the course of a day sometimes remain with her overnight, sometimes return to their previous places, and sometimes disappear altogether. The Tara we encounter at the outset of her journal is resigned, and undertakes the tedious authorial labor of carving out a new life within the rift. “Maybe there’s healing in sentences,” she speculates occasionally.

I won’t lie to you: this novel is repetitive. And Tara’s mental state amplifies the repetition by recursively fixating on the same themes, such as reiterated versions of the statement, “It is the eighteenth of November. I have got used to that thought.” But Balle profits from this cyclicality, not only to build suspense, but to invite rumination on the minute-yet-significant nuances of human experience. When Tara later writes, “I am becoming used to that thought,” a reader is reminded that coming to terms with an existence in which you relive a single day might not be, in itself, a linear process.

Much of the interest of this book resides in observing how Tara responds to her circumstances, and in considering how her choices and reactions might compare or contrast to one’s own. I found myself alternately frustrated with Tara’s inactivity and inspired by her willingness to sit quietly and catalog the smallest details of her day. She becomes fascinated, for instance, with her emotional changeability in an unchanging world. On day #128 she announces: “I have a mood. That is new.” This is a major plot development.

Possibly this overview has convinced you that “On the Calculation of Volume I” is boring. Indeed, at times, it is. But as a busy professor, wife, and mother of two, I confess that I found its aridity quiet and cozy, if tinged with sadness. A beauty, a manifestation of profound truth, emerges through the boring repetitions in this book. 

Doubtless, none of us have been caught in a time loop, but we have all faced (or will inevitably face) circumstances of sorrow, loss, displacement, or trauma that explode the comfortable stories of our lives. Balle’s novel explores the implications of human existence when it loses its accustomed narrative quality, when grief or failure arrests the very movement of time as we perceive it. The journal witnesses Tara’s desire for a story, for a life that moves forward, for a selfhood that grows, despite temporal inertia. But in doing so, it also records her movement, day by day, further from her previous life, her husband, her friends, and her professional commitments. 

In one sense, Tara has been left behind. She is frozen, while her loved ones and the earth itself presumably continue their forward momentum. In another sense, it is everyone else who is caught in a static loop, while Tara continues on, progressing or deteriorating, greeting each November 18th as a distinct day. The intellectual and emotional gymnastics involved in comprehending this caused me anguish and confusion as I read, but it was an anguish and confusion that I cherish, because it reminded me of my own past cataclysms — the graduate school rejection that reframed my career prospects, the miscarriage that erased my first dreams of motherhood — and drew me closer to the disruptions and tribulations that regularly derail the lives of my family and friends. This fanciful story has renewed and augmented my capacity to weather such sorrows, and to walk alongside others as they grapple with their own, very real, time rifts.

Tara Selter’s shocking predicament emphasizes, through contrast, the miraculous continuity of spacetime, which, through God’s sustaining power, makes it coherently meaningful to us, unfolding as a narrative that is, paradoxically, uniquely our own, yet interwoven with a greater objective reality. We, as God’s stewards of creation, are made to craft individual and communal stories, and such narratives are both precious and fragile. The resilience that drives Tara to narrate her experience testifies to our image-bearing capacity to co-labor with Christ in the redemption of even the most shattered stories, to anticipate new creation by compiling, step by step, fresh and captivating narratives for our lives in the aftermath of devastation. 

In addition to its philosophical richness, Balle’s prose, beautifully translated by Barbara Haveland, is simple but redolent. It is a slow, human book for a harried, inhuman age. In a tight 161 pages, “On the Calculation of Volume I” challenges us to stop and contemplate the small, simple wonders of God’s world, the sublime mysteries he ordains, and our uniquely meaningful place within them.

So, go ahead, pick up a copy, if only to enhance your mystique at dinner parties. But perhaps, like me, you will be overcome by the tendency of such books to draw us out of ourselves and into our shared humanity. Perhaps, like me, you will find that God can transmute even the reading we do for the wrong reasons into a revelation of his grace, of his power to resurrect our barren stories by grafting them into his own.

Heather Hess serves as assistant professor of English at Covenant College.