We tend to think of repetition, especially with regard to novels and other media, in negative terms. To say a work is formulaic or cliched is to say that it repeats exhausted tropes and plots.
But repetition is central to art. Tradition, character, genre and style are all types of repetition. Repetition is at the heart of various literary forms and modes.
The genre at play in On the Calculation of Volume, by the Danish writer Solvej Balle, is the time loop narrative, in which a period of time is repeated, usually more than once, leading the protagonist to search for a way to return to “normal” time. This device is perhaps best known from films such as Groundhog Day (1993) and Palm Springs (2020), and the television series Russian Doll (2019–22).
On the Calculation of Volume was conceived before Groundhog Day, but its gestation has been notably long. Six books of the seven-book series have been published in Danish, the first in 2020, by Balle’s own publishing house. The fourth has now appeared in English (with the first two volumes translated by Barbara J Haveland and the most recent volumes translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell).
The sequence is being translated into 20 other languages, perhaps one reason its English publisher has been keen...
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