Hot on the heels of Jon Fosse winning the Nobel Prize, another Nordic septology is translated into English! New Directions is publishing it! It’s speculative fiction, like a serious Groundhog Day in which the narrator finds herself trapped, repeating the same “cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds,” the publisher’s copy reads. “Absolutely, absolutely incredible,” boasts the premiere of Nordic literature, Knausgaard, on the cover blurb.
Put another W in Big Indie’s tally, I guess. I’ve read half the Knausgaard series. I liked it but not enough to finish it. I read the Fosse Septology when it was translated, but I haven’t found myself thinking about it since. I love Vigdis Hjorth, but she tends to be overlooked in these conversations. Why would I buy this?
Vol 1 is 160 pages.
So, purchased and sent directly to the top of the To Be Read pile, but to be read skeptically. Ready to disagree with it from word one and find the speculative angle overdetermined. Ready to find it bleak and overwrought and cold. Ready to hate.
The novel begins with the narrator travelling. She and her husband are book dealers; she makes the connections, scouts the books, and picks them up while he stays home and manages the shipping. The novel’s two most compelling threads--the tender mundanity of romantic love & the effects of global supply chains--are established from the outset.
Tara, the novel’s protagonist, begins her narration on the 122nd repetition of November 18th. She’s flashing back, telling us everything she remembers about November 17th, the 1st 18th, and the subsequent 121 repetitions of that day. The narration gives the appearance of a diary, something of which she is both the author and audience, and the purpose seems to be to learn, to keep a detailed record of what is happening with the hope of breaking the repetition.
So far so boring. Like audio logs scattered through a subpar video game haphazardly placed to provide some substance for the gameplay. The novel takes its conceit very seriously though; because Tara has lived through this day 121 times, she’s experienced the day. She knows what will happen when, sure, but Balle’s prose spends much more time detailing the sensations of the day. What sounds her husband makes as he prepares his breakfast and coffee, the smell of the spare room she’s been hiding out in as she relives the days, what it’s like to eat the same food, day after day, restricted in choices by what’s available.
Perhaps my attention is overtly directed towards sensorial experiences because of the Twitter furor stirred up over a bystander’s dissertation, but this fucking rips. The way this sensorial detail guides our attention to the growing tenderness and love of Tara for her husband through these repetitions. The way she learns his habits, knows his actions, and is able to honestly and accurately understand the way he encounters the day is an astonishing document of love. The tenderness with which she learns his movements, first by confronting him, telling him about her predicament and trying to sort it out with him anew every day and then by hiding & avoiding the horror of that conversation is only available through a kind of Groundhog’s Day world in which she can get new information, remember it, and learn while he is eternally stationary. Through first 122, and then 122 more, and then some more additional repetitions, Balle demonstrates what it takes to pay attention , to another person and to the world around us.
This latter point is the most interesting intervention in the novel, though. For some reason, a quirk in Tara’s world is that anything she consumes ceases to reappear on the day’s repetition, though what others consume reappears as they do. This leads to first her fridge depleting, then individual stocks of her favorite foods at the nearest store, then the store’s entire supply of food, so that, at almost a year of repetitions, she is forced to leave town to purchase food. While there’s no narration of what, for instance, the employees of the store think is happening, this speculative quirk illuminates the function of just in time supply chains.
It takes massive amounts of energy for things to arrive at your local store. This is especially true in a world of globalized supply chains, where I can purchase tomatoes in the middle of a South Dakotan winter. The waste byproducts of this energy accumulate, and have accumulated, to such a degree that we’ve changed the planet’s climate catastrophically. The waste byproducts of the food and its packaging have dissolved and similarly spread across the planet, embedding themselves by the millions as microplastics in our bodies and swirling around in giant continents of trash at sea. This is all relatively invisible in our day to day lives, though. We have the tomatoes when we want them, and we take our trash to the dumpster when we’re done. What happens before or after isn’t our business.
Balle’s novel makes it our business. In representing the mundanity of living the same day over and over, and contrasting Tara’s knowledge of that with everyone else’s NPC status, Balle collapses geological time. No one is providing food on her timeline of 122 days to 1. No one is picking up her trash weekly. As such, waste begins to accumulate while resources deplete. This isn’t just a problem for her, but, we imagine, it is a problem for everyone in her town. If there’s nothing on the shelves in the stores, they all have to go to the next town. When that store is depleted, they’ll have to move farther out. In putting Tara on a different timeline than the world’s infrastructure, Balle can represent the accumulation and depletion global supply chains facilitate in ways that are normally invisible to those of us progressing a day at a time.
So, I guess the speculative angle is not unearned or uninteresting. It isn’t simply a Nordic Groundhog Day, or Palm Springs, or Happy Death Day. The first 160 pages of Balle’s septology tear geological time apart, flattening it in one timeline to exaggerate it in another, and in doing so shows us the rift contemporary production is tearing in the world.
I ordered vol. 2 yesterday.