On the Calculation of Volume IV

 

With the fourth volume of Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, Tara finds herself in a radically different situation from any she's encountered before. Squatting in an empty mansion, her small group of fellow-strandees in 18th November are inundated with more and more people in the same predicament, until the bedrooms and conservatory and kitchens of the big house overflow. They learn there are groups set up in other cities; people travel back and forth. The days are spent, no longer alone, in busily foraging for food, managing the household, and in endless conversations about their situation.

 Towards the end of this book, the group holds a conference to more formally discuss the matters that preoccupy them: matters of language (what should they call themselves? what should they call the people who live through the same 18th November unawares? Loopers? Returners? How should they mark their own eccentric passing of time? Divide the days into hundreds, or centia, or tens, decia?), preparations for their own aging, the weird similarity between everyone who's found themselves thus stuck, the possible causes. Some disturbing facts emerge as they compare notes: a mysterious earth tremor on the first 18th November, not repeated; the loss of a pregnancy. And at the very end of the novel, the most unexpected occurance of all -- Tara's husband Thomas, far away in rural France, for the first time ever on the 18th November breaks his usual pattern and calls her. 

The book ends with Tara once more aboard a train, speeding home toward Thomas. Is the glitch in time beginning to break apart at last? I love the way Balle ends each book on a cliffhanger of sorts, though again there is little in the way of plot development. I'm wondering if OTCOV is a meditation on life itself? Does it trace a journey: beginning with the infant's awareness of the isolated self, then the individual existence of a few important others, then widening out to embrace a whole tribe? If Tara can reconnect meaningfully with Thomas, will we see the (re)discovery of love?