(by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland)
When this book opens, Tara Selter is experiencing the same day—November 18th—for the 121st time. She tells us about her day—this 121st iteration of it— and a bit about who she is in normal life: she lives in a small town in France with her husband; they are antiquarian book dealers. She tells us about what she was doing on the 17th of November, and then about what happened on the 18th of November the first time around. She was traveling for work; she visited a friend and met the friend’s girlfriend; there is no obvious event that would seem to have caused this “rift in time” she is stuck in, nothing to explain how or why it happened. And then the whole book is various versions of the day, as Tara tries to figure out what is happening, and how it might end, and how she should live in the meantime.
I’d been meaning to read this since at least last August but hadn’t gotten around to it yet, and then my husband read it and really liked it and thought I might also really like it, and that bumped it up to the top of my queue. And I did really like it: the way Balle describes the strangeness of Tara’s situation but also the sameness of her days, but also the ways in which she makes those days vary. (The externals of the day are always the same—the light, the weather, and so on—but Tara isn’t stuck repeating her own actions.)
A lot of the book is Tara figuring out how to move through the days either with or apart from her husband: she can have his companionship each day, if she wants it, but each morning she wakes remembering whatever they did the previous day, while he wakes to his first November 18th, thinking she’s away for work/not expecting her to be home yet. It’s an interesting way to explore the tensions of loneliness and connection, separateness and togetherness.
As others have noted, there is a whole lot of beautiful writing in this book. Like: “I have not found a way out of the eighteenth of November, but I have found roads and paths through the day, narrow passages and tunnels I can move along.” I especially love the writing near the end of the book, where Tara writes about feeling like the day is “full of possibility and replete with detail and incident and movements that could change direction at any moment,” and where she notices “So many things, colors. So many signs, shops, people, so many articles in the shops, so many handles on so many doors, so many shoes walking along the streets, so many coats” and more, “so many details, a maelstrom of objects,” all the things that make up every single day, but that we can glide past without noticing.
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