(by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland)
In the first volume of this book, Tara Selter, who’s stuck in a time loop where she keeps waking up on November 18, suggested to her husband that maybe they should go to Paris together, since that’s where the time loop started for her and maybe if she goes back she can somehow wake up on a different day. He tells her she should probably go by herself, which she does, and this second volume picks up with Tara in Paris, still living through an apparently endless series of November 18ths. She feels adrift without her work, without the routines of home, without anything: “I have no plans, I have no calendar,” she thinks and then: “I no longer have any business here.”
So she starts traveling, first to Lille, then to Dunkirk, then to various places in Germany, then to Brussels. She eavesdrops on other train passengers, she takes notes, she reads. And in Brussels, she visits her parents: she’s been counting the days and if she were in normal time, it would be Christmas, so she makes her own Christmas-in-November with her parents and her sister, even though she knows they won’t remember it. But staying in Brussels doesn’t make sense, any more than staying at home with her husband made sense, so she decides to keep traveling. Specifically, she decides that she wants to experience winter, which means she needs to head north, to someplace where there might be snow in November. She then hatches a plan to travel to places in sequence so that she can experience the weather that she associates with each season in turn, winter then spring then summer then fall. After the stasis of the first volume, the travel of this second volume is a satisfying contrast, though of course it’s within the context of the larger ongoing stasis of the 18th of November.
So Tara travels and makes her own seasons for a while. And then at some point she digs the Roman coin that she acquired in the first book out of her bag, and soon thereafter finds herself obsessively researching the Roman Empire. Which feels a bit odd as an impulse but I guess the fundamental aloneness of Tara’s experience of traveling by herself and worrying about her impact on the planet while living the same day over and over again might make anyone prone to odd impulses. This book was an even quicker read for me than the first one was, and while I might need to take a pause and read something else for a change of pace, I am definitely looking forward to picking up the next volume in the not-too-distant future.
As with the previous volume, there are some really lovely passages in this one. Like this, from when Tara is in Odense and is remembering a different time when she was there with her husband, when they were waiting for their train and it started to snow: “we all stood there, watching the snow falling outside and landing on the platform canopies, on the empty tracks and doubtless on the streets around the station, on buildings and roads we could not see due to the density of the snow that had filled the air. We stood there as if inside a container made of glass, but not one of those souvenir globes in which snow falls over a city or a building when it is shaken, because here it was the other way around: it was the world outside that had been shaken, while we remained still and the snow fell and fell outside the station, which had suddenly been transformed from an ordinary railway station to an attraction, a magical scene.”
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