On The Calculation of Volume 1

A Tara Selter is on a trip in Paris for her collectable books business. She is away from Thomas, her husband and business partner, who stayed at home, in a small town in France. On her second day in Paris she finds that the newspapers, clocks, all sources of date information tell her the same thing: that the date is the same as it was yesterday: the date is November 18. Not only that, a couple of the unique books that she purchased the day before have disappeared from her room, after at the front desk about the cleaning staff and deciding that theft is out of the question, she returns to the shops where she bought the books and, sure enough, they are right back in those very same shops, so she buys the books again and she does so she notices that her bank balance is right back where it was the previous morning. Very odd.

The same day repeats for her but for nobody else (or so it seems.) After repeating a whole day in this way, she naturally goes back home to her husband in hopes of support from someone who won’t think she is crazy. At home she surprises her husband who expects her to return on the 19th not the 18th. She explains her experience to her husband and he is sympathetic; they start to think as a team about this mysterious time behavior; they go to bed that night, wake up the next day and the husband is surprised again to find his wife home a day early from Paris.

There is no suspense you would expect in a time travel page turner, the story has no real special effects or added extraordinary drama, no one’s life is in danger. No, the struggle is that Tara realizes a loneliness living the same day endlessly next to a man with whom she is deeply in love, yet Thomas, nevertheless, is unable to understand and share her biggest problem. She fears this will eventually cause a permanent separation between her and Thomas. So the story continues, documenting Tara’s attempts to understand her situation, her thought processes, her struggles with her morale as all her escape ideas come to nought. Eventually she knows the events of the 18th so well that she lives in the same house with Thomas as invisibly as a ghost, only leaving the guestroom when her husband is running errands or asleep.

If this seems boring, well it could be boring, but the author’s strength is how she can describe precisely, creatively the events and observations of a life alone, as well as the intricacies of Tara’s mental state as she struggles with her subtle, frustrating predicament.

So something has happened after all. Tara Selter, alone in the eighteenth of November has acquired a mood. It comes over me almost every day, not for the whole day, but suddenly it is there, it is noticeable. Today is no exception, I am a bit irritable, maybe it's boredom, but it makes me happy, because there is open space around me and there is room for a mood. It feels almost as if there is someone living in here. A fluctuating mood is rather like a dance, it really swings, even though there isn't much room. There is room enough in here for my mood to shift. Now it shifts again. Gaiety fills the room.

I am not saying I have lost hope. It just doesn't come by so often any more. It has moved away. It was quite undramatic, it did not slam the door behind it, it is more as if, like an animal, it has found new hunting grounds, like a cat that has moved next door or a plant that has scattered its seeds where they are more likely to grow.

Those are just two examples, but I could produce dozens of similarly crafted exemplary passages. All that said, there are seven, 7(!) books in this international Booker Prize winning series and right now the farthest I imagine reading is through the second book. Beautifully written as it is, this book is not Groundhog Day and I just don’t see Amazon buying the rights to this literary property.