On the calculation of volume

Review by Booklist Review

The richly strange first book of Danish author Balle's seven-part novel is a dreamy, quirky, and indefinitely prolonged version of Groundhog Day. Narrator Tara Selter has been living a quiet life in northern France with her husband, Thomas, who's also her partner in an antiquarian book business. But then, on a bookbuying expedition in Paris, Tara goes to bed on November 18 of an unspecified year, and wakes up to find that it is November 18 again. The temporal glitch continues day after day, apparent only to her. When Tara makes her way home, Thomas is newly astonished every day to see her there, knowing that she should be in Paris. She records her experiences every day, keeping careful count, until a year's worth of days have piled up. Tara has grown older and changed, while the rest of the world has not, and she begins to feel like a ghost and a monster, haunting her own life. The philosophical conundrum at the novel's heart is grounded in the ordinariness of everyday, domestic life, and the dilemmas of a marriage in which one partner changes and the other doesn't. A cliffhanger will leave readers anxious to read Book Two.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Balle (According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind) launches a speculative septology with this astounding chronicle of a rare book dealer's struggle over the course of one year as she wakes up each morning only to repeat the same day. The trouble begins during a trip to Paris, where Tara Selter has traveled on November 17 from the home in northern France she shares with her husband and business partner, Thomas, with plans to return on the 19th. On the 18th, she calls Thomas with an update, then badly burns her hand on a radiator. She nurses the wound, and after waking up the next morning in her hotel room, she discovers from the newspaper and her cellphone that the date hasn't changed. When she gets home, Thomas believes she's returned a day early. The next morning, and each morning after that, she tries to explain to Thomas what's happened, as he doesn't remember. Among the stunning qualities of Balle's brilliant narrative is the way it suspends judgment, simultaneously sustaining the possibility that Tara has gone insane and that she really is caught in a "rift in time." There are no easy answers in this deeply mysterious tale. Readers won't be able to look away. (Nov.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A woman navigates a world in which time has stopped moving forward for her. This slim but densely meditative novel, the first in a seven-volume series by veteran Danish author Balle, is narrated by Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller living in northern France. She has recently discovered that she keeps repeating November 18--thrusting her into a world where "time fell apart," as she puts it. This doesn't provoke panic, nor does it instill an urge for intellectual and moral improvement à laGroundhog Day. Rather, Tara moves in a sea of bemused curiosity--what is she allowed to retain from day to day, and what gets erased? The early part of her chronicle--the novel is formatted as diary entries, numbering the days she's been "stuck" on November 18--concern her efforts to sort out the reasons why time is out of joint with the help of her husband and business partner, Thomas. Every day she informs him of her predicament (which he accepts with admirable equipoise) as they attempt to determine what might have caused it. She retraces her steps--a visit with a fellow bookseller, the acquisition of an ancient Roman coin, an accidental burn on her hand--but no explanation is forthcoming. Some things endure as the days repeat, like her notebook, and the stores she shops at don't seem to replenish their stocks. Though Tara isn't driven to despair by all this, Balle captures a sense of disorientation and loss that intensifies in the later pages of the novel, as if she's working through the stages of death: "I am a monster, a beast, a pest," she laments. The story concludes at the end of her first year's worth of November 18s, and though there's no resolution, Balle has set up the emotional and intellectual stakes for the project; though temporally, Tara is stuck in neutral, intellectually the story plainly has lots of places to go. A sober, thoughtful study of time and connection. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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