On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)
On the surface, On the Calculation of Volume could be a genre novel—many race to reference Groundhog Day in the first sentence of their reflection. To me, it was a meditation on what happens when the markers we use to reason no longer work.
The protagonist, Tara Selter, is an antiquarian book dealer whose job is to quantify the value of things and to ensure that the right thing reaches the right place. She travels to bid on and collect rare books and in turn, like a tock for her tick, her husband Thomas sends them to people so that they may add them to their collections. Her daily life is portrayed with dispassion: she herself seems to be a sorting mechanism for space that is propelled by the progression of time. It is on a business trip where time falls apart, and she begins to encounter the same day over and over again.
After the initial alarm, she returns home to Thomas. Upon each iteration she informs him of the time-loop situation from scratch, and, for a while, there is a devil-may-care exuberance of experiencing love unbounded by the passing of time: they joke, go for walks, eat, and make love. She tracks the days with notches on paper, and with the aid of Thomas, runs experiments to debug the loop. Soon, though, the exuberance runs out, and ironically, Tara begins to feel temporally distant from Thomas. Each day that passes, each iteration, leaves Tara with a subjectivity that has moved on, while Thomas' has not. It is here she decides to proceed alone, moving into a guest room within her own house.
In the guest room she lives according to her husband's rhythm, now the tock for his tick, studying the sounds Thomas makes as he moves through the house, timing her life to his so as to not be discovered while being near. Here she begins solitary acts of orientation: like a sailor, she procures a telescope to view the night sky. It is also here she begins the diary through which the reader comes to know her. The text of On the Calculation of Volume is that record: the exhaust she leaves behind, the clues for her future self, as if a subjectivity-based dead reckoning.
I think if I were expecting a genre novel, I may have been disappointed (there are no interdimensional bing bongs or glib glorb lore). As an exploration of reorienting subjectivity, though, I almost found it soothing. It left me wondering how I may be a Tara. What are my fruitless rituals of reorientation? And what are the unknown pleasures of being disoriented?