My Year In November 18ths

Time began tormenting me in March of last year. I had been traveling for weeks to promote my book about gossip, a kind of capstone to the fastest-paced era of my life. All of it—the podcast we made, the fervent response it received, the life of deadlines, and the pressure and joy it created—flew by. I felt as if I had not really sat down or slept or relaxed in four years. Then suddenly, by my own choosing, it was over. For the first time since 2021, I did not know what the next six months held for me. My weeks were not scheduled down to the minute. The urgency of responsibility and expectations left me, and time stretched out before me like a wide, open plain: infinite and terrifying. During these weeks of travel, I carried around On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle in my bag, with the hope that I might choose to open it and read instead of responding to emails or looking at my phone. The Danish novel—the first of seven in a series, four of which have now been translated into English—follows Tara Stelter, an antiquarian bookseller, who is trapped inside a time loop. Every night, she goes to bed on November 18th, and every morning, she wakes up and it is November 18th again. There is no big bang, no huge mistake, no life-altering decision in Tara’s life. One night, she has dinner with some friends in Paris on a work trip. The only really remarkable thing about the day was that she touched a hot lamp and got a mild burn, but the burn isn’t even really that bad, and Tara feels certain that it will heal fine. The next morning, she goes to eat breakfast at the hotel, and as she watches the same piece of bread float to the ground, just like it did the day before, she knows in her gut that this is more than deja vu. “The moment I saw this hesitant action I knew that I was witnessing a repetition,” she writes. “I knew that something was wrong.” One of the first things Tara learns about her new life is that not everything can or will enter the time loop in which she exists. Though her bank account automatically resets every day, so she has plenty of money, the things she buys do not necessarily remain. Some evaporate into the loop without warning. Some, like an antique coin she bought for her husband, disappear and then reappear again. The only way to try and keep an object in the loop is to keep it with her: to carry it about on her day, sleep with it in her bed and worry over it. In this way, my relationship with the first volume of Balle’s series followed the rules of Tara’s world. I carried the book around with me, accidentally slept with it in my bed, until it stuck, and one day it could no longer leave me. I opened the first volume on a cold March night in Chicago, and I began my own journey into the 18th of November just as Tara did: waking up in a hotel room in a city that is not my own, and knowing that my future would be different.