About Account Volume Three by Solvej Balle Review – How to Make a Time Loop Endlessly Interesting | Imagination in translation

TThe time loop story, in which characters repeatedly experience the same time period, has become synonymous with the 1993 film Groundhog Day, but the idea has much older roots. In P. D. Ouspensky’s 1915 novel The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, a weakened Osokin is given the opportunity to live his life again, only to find himself making the same mistakes. Like the insufferable Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, Osokin can’t change anything without changing himself.

Solvej Balle’s highly acclaimed series on calculating volume takes a completely different approach. I first started working on the idea decades ago, several years before the movie Groundhog Day was released. She says the film “helped me research by trying some paths I didn’t want to take.” The books, five so far with two more planned, have proven a literary sensation in her native Denmark, with the first three volumes together scooping the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize, Scandinavia’s highest literary honor. This is the third book to be published in English this year; The former has been shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

Paley’s protagonist, Tara Selter, is an antique book dealer from a small town in France, who finds herself trapped on a buying trip to Paris on November 18. For others, as the morning comes and the day resets, it’s November 18 for the first time. They perform the same actions in the same order, unaware of any repetition. Only Tara remembers the previous November 18th. She counts the days and tries to make sense of the bewilderingly inconsistent rules of her new reality. Some of the possessions she acquires stay with her when the day repeats itself, while others go back to where they came from. She herself can travel: she is trapped in time but not in space. She can also interact with people and change the events of their day. The problem is that come November 18, they don’t remember anything.

In the first volume, Tara returns home from Paris to her partner, Thomas. She tries to enlist his help, but the ordeal of explaining all over again every morning wears her down and she moves to the spare room, haunting his day invisibly, like a ghost. In the second volume, Thirsty for the Seasons, she traverses Europe, from north to south, in search of the ordinary shape of the year in one recurring day. It was only at the beginning of the third volume that I finally discovered a break in the pattern. “I’ve met someone who remembers,” she announced, dizzy with doubt and gratitude.

Henry Dale, a Norwegian sociologist, was also besieged on 18 November. For 1,143 days, Tara’s diary served as her “sole witness.” [her] “The confidant.” Now she had Henry; Not quite a friend but a fellow traveler. Before long, they meet another couple who share their predicament. The four suddenly find themselves defined by each other, and the different ways they choose to respond to their situation. It is the most logical, the most ethical, and the most correct? They struggle to agree. Should they use their prior knowledge to prevent accidents and disasters that frequently occur on November 18th? Or should they – can they – change the systems that make accidents inevitable? Is it enough to pay close attention and try to understand what repetition reveals about the world? How should they organize their shared life now that they are four years old?

The third volume is more digressive than its predecessors, and more charged with history and philosophy. They are also more flexible, opening their enclosed spaces to more air and light. For all her sensitivity and keen intelligence, Tara Pal is a disconcertingly disembodied creature: indifferent to food and, after Thomas, untroubled by sexual appetite, never once in three volumes does she allude to her menstrual cycle, certainly for a woman in her thirties, a defining marker of time. She’s also frustratingly not inclined to tell jokes.

But as her focus broadens, Pal offers some welcome flashes of humor while maintaining the compulsive, hypnotic effect of the first two books. They are compulsive, there can be no doubt about that. In three volumes, Pal’s insightful interest and curiosity in forensics continues to make November 18th endlessly interesting. Over the course of an uninterrupted period of an ordinary 24 hours, she spins profound meditations on love and loneliness, on grief and hope and longing, on the greed of human consumption and the ordinary, unthinking mundanity of everyday life, on how we understand the past and anticipate the future. Her winding sentences wrap around us, her readers, hooking us again and again until November 18, drawing us deeper and deeper into their unfathomable possibilities. By this third volume, the day no longer belongs exclusively to Tara. She belongs to her three companions – and to us.

In Groundhog Day and indeed in The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, the story derives its driving momentum from the protagonist’s search for escape. Somewhere, inside or outside them, there is a key that will unlock time and set them free. Tara Selter no longer believes in freedom. She knows she will never escape. But what she learned from November 18, and what others taught her, adds to her own life.