The Infertility of Time

On Solvej Balle's 'On the Calculation of Volume'

Anselm Kiefer, Les Reines de France, 1995, Mixed media on canvas

#1

Solvej Balle’s book series On the Calculation of Volume is all about waiting. This waiting extends to its readership. Though it’s cast as a septology, only six of the books are published, and of those, only four have been translated into English. Book V is scheduled to be released in English in November. Book seven does not have a release date, not even in its original language.

The books follow an antiquarian bookseller named Tara Selter, who is trapped in the 18^th of November. Her first 18^th of November is a normal day. She wakes up in her Paris hotel, eats breakfast downstairs while reading a newspaper, buys a few books around town, and chats with a local bookseller. She accidentally burns her hand on a heater in his store. She goes back to her hotel to sleep. The next day, she goes down for breakfast once more. A hotel guest drops a piece of toast in the exact same manner as the day prior. The newspaper says November 18. Her receipts say November 18. The bookseller has no memory of their interactions from the day before. To everyone else in the world, the day is November 18, and the previous November 18 that Tara lived through did not happen. But the burn mark is still on her hand.

Some call it a time loop story but it is not quite that; even as November 18^th repeats itself, Tara continues to age and move through the world. Her burn mark festers and heals, her hair grows, and her skin, given enough time, will wrinkle. Balle takes great care to lay out the rules and lack thereof as the narrator herself tries to make sense of them. Tara can accumulate objects during the day, but they disappear overnight, put back where they came from. That is, unless she sleeps with them underneath her pillow. If she purchases food from a grocery store, it does not reappear on the shelves the next day. And when she writes in a notebook, the words are preserved the next day. “The paper remembers,” she writes. “And there may be healing in sentences.”

Is this a story about time, or something else? Hernan Diaz has said it is about isolation. But the Washington Post called it the “great modern novel of depression.” Others have said it is about the importance of creating meaning “within a system that feels arbitrary” and about “the remarkable richness of each moment.” Or perhaps it is about scientific inquiry?

All of these readings are correct in their own way, especially as the series is still in development. Yet there’s one interpretation I’ve not yet seen, one that feels undeniable to me. Our main character is a youngish woman of unspecified age, married not too long ago, who was happy with life until she was thrust suddenly into this purgatory. Now she is stuck and desperate while everyone else around her seems perfectly fine. She wants to live a normal life but something beyond her control is holding her back. Even though she is not old, she fears aging. These books are about infertility.

#2

It took two uterine surgeries, a cross-country move, three doctor switches, and countless tests to learn that I would never be able to conceive children naturally. This diagnosis was due, among other things, to aggressive uterine polyps. Luckily we live in a world of scientific miracles, so conceiving children was (and is) still theoretically an option through in vitro fertilization combined with additional (and frequent) uterine surgeries. After two and a half years of effort (and drugs and procedures and pain), we finally got a date on which it might happen. A positive pregnancy test. We had created 10 genetically sound embryos, scheduled a final uterine surgery date to prepare my body to receive them, and received our plan for an embryo transfer and the formal pregnancy test that would follow. In 58 days, we thought, we might finally be out of our purgatory (to enter another, more common nine-month purgatory, before the ultimately desired new life phase: parenthood). Fifty-eight days.

This was February. I wrote down the number. Fifty-eight. It wasn’t a guarantee but we finally had hope. I wrote this number down in a notebook 58 times. I counted from one to 58 aloud and timed how long it took. Twenty-five seconds. I could do it in one breath if I said the numbers fast enough. I opened up my daily tracking spreadsheet. In this spreadsheet each day I would catalogue what I wrote, what I read, which tarot card I pulled, how my uterus was feeling, whether or not I cried. I added a new column and typed: “58.” The next day, I typed the number 57. I decided to start writing down interesting facts about each number. Fifty-seven is the atomic number of lanthanum, soft enough to be cut with a knife. Fifty-two is the atomic number of tellurium, one of the rarest earth metals: needed for solar panels, gives you garlic breath. It is also the number of cards in a deck, white keys on a piano, weeks in a year. Somewhere in the world is a mysterious whale known as “52 Blue” because it is the only whale ever recorded to sing at 52 hertz, a much higher pitch than every other whale, so it is dubbed the world’s loneliest whale because it is only ever singing to itself. This is how I spent my purgatory.

Two days later, I read Calculation.

In these books, time is not counted by days of the year but by the number of times November 18^th has repeated. The first book starts on day #121 and stretches back to record those first days. The narrator is focused during her first year on getting to day #366. But in the meantime, she makes the most of her purgatory. She counts the days and catalogues her existence: “The movements of the birds, the sound of the wind in the trees, the rain tailing off and intensifying, the sound of a plastic plant pot being blown around the cobbles at the corner of the house.”

#3

Calculation is not literally about infertility. At least, this is not the only thing it’s about. But I imagine it was one of the things on Balle’s mind. She first conceived of its premise in 1987, but didn’t start writing the book in earnest until 1999, after she was divorced and remarried. She gave birth to her only son in 2002, when she was 40 years old, after five years of being married. According to a New York Times interview, she and her new husband discussed having a family pretty much right away. Did it take five years to achieve this?

Either way, it is clear that Tara is of an age where children are a reasonable possibility. In Book II, she goes to her family’s house and speaks of it with her mother:

Did she dream of grandchildren? Did she dream of getting the high chair down from the attic? She didn’t know. More than anything she wanted her own children to be happy. . . . One day, she said, she would like to have grandchildren, of course, but right now she was content with the children she had.

Tara has to explain over and over again to the people she loves what’s happening to her. It is a private disaster that no one notices. An hourglass ticks too quickly inside her body and no one cares. Why should they? It’s her problem, not theirs.

#4

Sometimes you read a book and it feels as if the author somehow peered into your head and wrote down what you could not say. This is how it felt to read Calculation. “I don’t know why the days have to be counted, but I don’t dare not to,” she writes. “I tell myself that I have to hold onto the days. Maybe there is help to be had from the columns of numbers. Like a rope you could use to haul yourself out of a well if you fall in.” The setting was completely alien but I was trapped in Tara Selter’s world, an endlessly repeating day, with the pressing need to catalogue everything because what else can she do? She is alone in the battle against the greatest enemy of all: time. She can fight, she can cope, but she can never win.

Still, occasionally, she allows herself a small bit of hope. She believes there is an end in sight. The end will be day #367, after a full year of purgatory, plus one day, the new November 18^th. She has no reason to believe this except that it feels right. On day #349, she leaves Clairon-sous-Bois and heads for Paris. The goal is to recreate her starting conditions. She spends day #366 revisiting old haunts. It goes uneasily, imperfectly, but the book ends on a note of hope: “The eighteenth of November is almost over. A year has passed and I am ready to make room for the nineteenth. I leave the day open. I go with the day. I flow with it wherever it may go. I let myself be carried along by the current. Now I swim. Dive.”

It’s not a spoiler to say: she does not escape. This is a seven-book series. The counting failed. It was all for nothing.

#5

It might have been a warning. On day 35 (the atomic number of bromine) of my countdown, the doctors found a new, unexpected problem. I would need a round of aggressive antibiotics and everything would be delayed by three weeks. The next day, my count jumped up, rather than down, from 35 to 55 (cesium). Still, there was a number. I could handle 55 days, I had done it before, I could do it again, there was still an end in sight. But my hope faded a little. I stopped writing down facts about numbers. I noted the countdown every day in my spreadsheet but otherwise I tried not to think about it.

“I am not saying I have lost hope,” the narrator writes midway through Book I:

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 plant that has scattered its seeds where they are more likely to grow.

Hope becomes a thing that mocks her. In one scene, she has a flash of hope because she’s certain the moon looks different than it did before. But when a cloud passes over it, she realizes it looks exactly the same. She feels as if she’s been caught by some prank. “As if the moon had altered its appearance just long enough for me to imagine that there really was a difference, only then to act all innocent just hanging there in the sky, totally deadpan.”

Days passed and 55 became 35 again, then 30, then 25 and 20. But on day 15 of the new countdown — phosphorus — we received more bad news. Fluid in the lining. Odds of pregnancy success were reduced by half, from 65% to 33%.

Our doctors recommended postponing the embryo transfer. They wanted to run more tests, maybe do another surgery, and try again later. This would take months. But they said we could still try now if we wanted to. We had to let them know by the end of the day.

My husband and I had just a couple of hours to make our decision. I did not count the moments in those hours but they were excruciating. Why was this decision given to us? But it was. We’re both Jewish but did not pray. This was a question of logic. My husband felt optimistic. A 33 (arsenic) percent chance is still a chance, and a better chance than we’d ever had. We had several healthy embryos banked and decided the low odds were worth it, that it would be okay if it didn’t work. If it failed, we would face several more months of purgatory — the same outcome postponement guaranteed — but proceeding still offered a small possibility of success.

So we told them we would move forward.

#6

The first book of Calculation is largely about love. Tara and her husband first try to figure out her predicament as a team. Such exploration brings them closer together:

I remember those as the happiest days. Ever. I felt loved. I felt loved on the sofa in the living room and on the floor. I felt loved in bed and when we sat at the dining table in the evening. There was nothing unusual in this. It was no different from before the eighteenth of November, only stronger, and there was nothing we had to do. This was a time that did not run away with us. It was like the time after we first met, only more intense and possibly — or so it seems to me now — with an undertone of quiet desperation, but that is not how we saw it. There was the feel of electrically charged skin, the way our sentences flowed together when we talked. There was something in the air between us, an intensity, a dense network of connections. I felt understood. I uttered sentences that were heard and heard the words that were spoken. We were living in two different times. That was all. Two times that had flooded their banks. At a place where rivers meet and converge, a kind of temporal Mesopotamia where the Euphrates and the Tigris are merely two different names for water. We were doing fine in Mesopotamia.

But their bond is breaking as they fall further apart in time. After 76 days, the distance has grown too great. So she hides herself in the spare room and pretends she is not there. They are both happier this way.

For a time, while she is in hiding, she still feels connected to her husband. She knows his patterns and can fit herself into them:

When Thomas is in the kitchen I can hear the connections between us. He sends messages and plays music all through the house. He sends messages I understand. They sound like running water, like metal on metal, like fridge doors bumping against countertops, but these are concerts he is playing and I play too, very softly.

But then as day #366 approaches, she reveals herself to him once more. She re-explains her predicament. He believes her; he always believes her. She tells him she plans to go to Paris. She wants to escape November 18^th and she wants his help.

But he says no.

Tara is alone.

#7

In dark times I sometimes ask my husband if he regrets marrying a woman with a broken body. He says no, obviously — what kind of monster would say otherwise? Yet I believe him. He explains that this is simply something terrible happening to both of us, through no fault of our own; my condition matters only insofar as it impacts the life we had imagined together. But more than his logic, it’s his presence that convinces me. Even though he is a night owl, he comes to every seven a.m. appointment just so he can hold my hand when I get my blood drawn. He watches every ultrasound so he can ask the doctor questions. This is not necessary. We’ve spent hours in these waiting rooms. There are plenty of women there on their own. Their spouses stay at home. Not mine. Perhaps they would come if they could, but their jobs and circumstances keep them away. Ours have allowed us to be together through it all. In many ways, we’re lucky. If I asked him to come with me to Paris, he’d say yes.

#8

But love is just one part of it. Tara’s husband receives little mention after Book I as she moves on to explore more of this world and the nature of reality. In Book II, the narrator starts talking about containers:

When I sit in my backyard I can tell that my time is a container. That is how it is. It is a day one can step into. Again and again. Not a stream which one can only dip into once. Time doesn’t fly anywhere, it stays still, it is a vessel. Every day I lower my body into the eighteenth of November. I move around but nothing runs over the edge.

Writer Rebecca Lowe has written that the references to containers continue to increase in Book III, suggesting that the book is exploring Newton’s “container theory” of time and space. In this theory, time and space are background containers that exist whether or not anything happens inside them. At the time it was proposed, the opposing theory came from German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who posited a “relational theory” of time instead, wherein time is composed of the relationship between its events. One event always happens before a different one, and time arises from the relationship between the two. If nothing happened, therefore, time would not exist. In the container theory of time, such relations are unnecessary. Time is an independent entity that does not care about what happens inside it. In Tara’s world, relations between events have become jumbled. The hotel guest drops her toast both before and after Tara returns to her husband. The hotel guest is continually dropping her toast before and after Tara moves through the world. The relationship between those two events doesn’t matter. All that matters is that time moves forward.

Of course, both theories were superseded by Einstein’s theory of relativity, with space and time as a continuum affected by mass and energy. Time and space are inextricably linked to the physical universe. Is this the more apt analogy? Two different people can experience two different rates of time depending on their velocity. Tara is moving at a different rate from everyone else. Is she moving too quickly, so that time slows to a stop? It doesn’t seem that way. The books (critics sometimes complain) move slowly. But it’s possible she alone could have stumbled onto an event with such mass that it’s pulling her beyond its event horizon. If this is the case, she truly can never escape. But what might have happened to pull her in, and (or so it seems at first) only her? November 18^th was a normal day.

Implications for physics and scientific progress aside: What does it matter if time is a container or a fabric or a series of relations? What difference does it actually make in our lives? Perhaps nothing, if you decide it means nothing. It may not change the physical construct of our days. Yet it can change our mental fabric, and the mental becomes the physical, as it drives our decisions for how to act. The container theory of time may not be true, but it can feel true, and this is what fiction does: turns an ambiguous feeling into a palpable story. So let’s say time is a container. Even if nothing is happening, no events are changing, time still moves forward, and it can be filled. Tara can fill her life with meaning. She can try to understand.

#9

And so her journey must cover more space. In Book II, Tara seeks a change in weather. She is tired of the same rainstorm day after day. She seeks weather and seasons. If the seasons will not change in a single day, they can still change in physical location. So first she travels north to find winter. Then south to find spring. Further south for summer. Then autumn in Germany, land of Oktoberfest. And so she settles in Düsseldorf. The year does not reset. “A year of seasons, I think to myself, but they weren’t seasons. They were wreckage, fished out of my stream of November days . . . I try not to think about years. It isn’t easy, but now I will think about days.”

She is back to filling each day as it is, a day to be considered on its own terms.

#10

I was obsessed about counting down because I wanted my purgatory to feel manageable. Something touchable. Numbers one through 58 don’t take up much space on the page of a journal. Once written down, I could see it all. I was putting my numbers into a container. Putting this period of life into a container. Telling myself it was finite.

But then the numbers started changing and rearranging. Thirty-five to 55 and then down again and then there were more numbers to keep track of. The lining check. The embryo transfer. And finally, nine days after the transfer: the pregnancy test.

These nine days were hateful to me. I didn’t need to write down the numbers to feel them in every neuron.

I had to act as if I were pregnant, even though I was certain I was not. This meant no drinking, of course, but also no running, no gardening. No writing, not because it wasn’t allowed, but because I was too distracted. All of the things I loved in my day-to-day, taken away, all for the inevitable “no.”

There was a physicality to this waiting period. There were the physical symptoms of the medications I was taking: shots in my legs that left painful baseball-sized lumps in the muscles, making it difficult to bend or walk, and hormone levels through the roof. But also a physical sadness beyond anything I’d felt before. I’ve had hormone swings before, I’ve had pain. This was something different. The inevitable “no.” Nine days of “no.” I did not and could not pray. It felt like a lead balloon in my chest. I kept thinking about this lead balloon growing bigger. I didn’t care if the metaphor didn’t make sense, it was something I kept coming back to. Swelling up and filling with . . . what?

The embryo transfer was not successful.

#11

I felt a weight lift. My balloon disappeared and I could run again, and I’ve never run faster. It helps that the days are long and the weather warm. It helps to sow seeds and watch them sprout and to buy plants and put them in the ground, even if half get eaten by rabbits. It helps that every day the ecology of the landscape is a little different, a little more of itself. But my husband found his own sadness. We’re never sad at the same time. Sometimes I think that should make me feel lonely, but it doesn’t. I need his optimism when I’m sad. He allows it of himself when I’m doing better; then I get to cheer him up instead. We may swim in different rivers, but our waters always come back together.

#12

In Calculation, Tara is counting up her days. They add together and grow. At the end of Book II, we reach day #1142. Maybe my problem was trying to count down, rather than up. I’m writing this shortly after the Jewish holiday Shavuot, which celebrates the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. This holiday comes seven weeks after Passover because the Israelites received the Torah seven weeks after escaping Egypt. Between these two holidays, the Torah commands we count each day, from one to 49. We count up, not down. Why? Because each day allows the opportunity for further spiritual growth. Each day is fuller than the last. It took 49 days of counting before the Israelites were spiritually ready to receive the Torah. Each year we need that reminder. We prepare ourselves to read it again and again.

#13

The world is made of numbers. Atoms and equations. They turn from concepts to real and back again. This essay has a certain number of letters, sentences, paragraphs. Thirteen sections. Some think 13 is an unlucky number. I disagree. It is the atomic number of aluminum, one of my favorite elements. Lightweight and reflective, extremely useful in space. You can put it in the oven, bake 10 loaves of bread, and touch it afterwards with your bare hands. In Judaism, 13 is the age at which a child becomes an adult. There are 13 Jewish principles of faith and 13 attributes of mercy. Read the Hebrew letters and add up each number to find the sum total of a word, and you’ll find 13 applies to “Oneness” and “Love.” The fundamental equations of the universe can fit on a T-shirt. We are trying to create something physical: life. Until then all we have are numbers.

On June 26^th, it is day #1036 of our journey to conception, a number so high there is no atomic element. And there is no end in sight. We have another surgery scheduled for the end of July, and will learn our timeline for another embryo transfer attempt after that. If it goes badly, this months-long cycle will repeat. After that, we switch to the search for a surrogate, which could take years.

From the very first pages of Calculation I knew I would write about these books. I hoped to write something at the end of all the waiting, once there is a child in the world. Now I know that may be years away and until then I will be waiting and waiting and I’m tired of waiting and at least with this, the only thing holding me back is myself. This book series has become a container to process this waiting because it tells my story better than I can tell it myself. And it tells a dozen other stories, too. I’ve been loose with the spoilers here because the plot elements don’t matter as much as the gifts every page provides. Let these books be your container for sadness, hope, despair, dreams, all of the things that fill our lives more and more as we move through the world.

We are living within a literary phenomenon and no one knows how it will end (perhaps even Balle herself). I haven’t gotten past Book II because I insist on receiving these books from the library, only ever after a long and ambiguous waiting period. But I’ve purchased both afterwards because they will be with me for a long time, as a testament to this period of life, when they found me at the right time. Now I’m on the waitlist for Book III and I’m not counting down, I’m counting up.

Denise S. Robbins is the author of The Unmapping, a speculative climate fiction novel published in June 2025. Her stories and interviews have been published in The Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast, Chicago Review of Books, and many more. Find her on Substack at denisesrobbins.substack.com.