(by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell)
When this book opens, Tara Selter has been stuck in the eighteenth of November for more than three years, and she feels like she might always be stuck in it. But something’s different: at the end of the last volume, she met someone else in the same predicament, a man called Henry Dale, so now she has someone to talk to, someone who won’t just forget their conversations after falling asleep and waking up again. Henry is a sociologist from Norway, and he and Tara compare notes on their experiences and end up moving in together, though he sometimes travels to America to see his son (who lives there with Henry’s ex-wife) and he correctly predicts that Tara will want to travel back to France to see her husband at some point. But for much of the book Tara is adrift: she doesn’t have quite the same feverish drive to immerse herself in Roman history as she did in the last book, and when she does eventually go to France, nothing is right: she talks to Thomas but feels like they’re in separate worlds, him with his normal life and her with “a long string of eighteenths of November trailing behind [her] like the tail of a kite,” essentially alone “with the sounds, and with the sea of history and its artifacts of the past.”
But if Tara isn’t the only person stuck in the eighteenth of November, maybe there are more people too, not just Henry? Spoiler alert: that is the case, and we meet a few of them, with the promise of more. As more people are introduced, this started to feel a bit like Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth trilogy, in the sense that you have this unlikely group of people of different ages/from different places/from different backgrounds thrown together, and I’m interested to see how that will develop in the next volume.
As in the previous book, there are some really great phrases in this one. Like when Tara tells Henry about “the mosaics in Cologne and all the Roman glass in the museum displays, transparent and full of November.” Or when Tara goes to a cafe and notices “that special morning blend of fresh baked goods and cleaning products, of coffee and tea and coats neatly draped over chairbacks or tossed onto the next seat.” I also really liked how Tara notices sounds again/differently in this volume, how the sounds of Düsseldorf make her think of the sounds of Clairon-sous-Bois, how she talks about going to concerts more than once and noticing different things each time—it makes me think about Georges Perec and his idea of the infra-ordinary, all the things we don’t pay attention to.
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