The Time Loop Book Series You Should Be Reading

Our draft guide picked up the name "The Beast," because of the crazy amount of information that's included.

“I'm looking at thousands of players putting together hundreds of scouting reports.”

I've been covering this year's draft since last year's draft. There is a lot in the beast that you simply can't find anywhere else. This is the kind of in-depth, unique journalism you get from the athletic and in New York Times. You can subscribe at NYTimes.com/subscrib. Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz, and this is the book review from the New York Times.

Today, I want you to imagine a scenario. You wake up one morning, and you start to go by your day as you do every day, and an eerie feeling begins to arise. Everything seems familiar, too familiar. Eventually, a realization starts to creep into your mind. Is it possible you're reliving yesterday? You go through the day, the day passes, you get a sleep, quote, "tomorrow arrives," and it

is the same day yet again. And then it is the same day yet again. Somehow you've become stuck in time. Well, it's Groundhog Day. Again.

“That's what we're here to talk about. Not Groundhog Day, the classic 1993 film starring”

Bill Murray. We are here to talk about another hit-time loop story. This one, a seven book series written by the Danish author Solve balla. It's called "On the Calculation of

Volume," and since its English translations first published in 2024, it has been nominated

for several major awards, and has become something of an under the reader phenomenon among the literary set. Book four in this series has just been published here in America, and I have two of my colleagues from the book review here to talk about the series. A.O. Scott, Tony Scott, our critic at Large, and Jumata, a team and editor here in my frequent guest, my frequent foil. Jumata, welcome. You, Gilbert. Tony, welcome. Hi, good to be here. Jumata, you're going to stay

on after the three of us talk to make some recommendations for other books and translation that listeners should check out. Absolutely. So no move. Before we start, I want to just put a

brief spoiler earlier here. We're primarily going to talk about the first three books, but we

definitely dip into the events of book four. So if you're on the verge of reading that, finish it, come back. We'll be here for you. Okay, Tony, we're going to loop back to the beginning here. Can you tell us where this, where this whole started, tell us about this author, tell us about this series? Well, it started. Solve balla is, she's in her 60s. She's a Danish novelist, and she'd written some things before this. And at some point, as early as 1987, she had this

idea before Groundhog Day, by the way, was released to have, you know, what if somebody got stuck in time and kept repeating the same day again and again and again? And what, what would that be like? And it over time, the project sort of took over her life. She lives on a small island, a sort of remote island in Denmark, and has been working on this for a very long time. It's this

“seven volume. I guess in Scandinavia, you have to publish books in groups of seven,”

the septology is a big, a big thing. There, Knowsker did it, and Yon Faso. And they have,

first in Europe, and now in North America, really kind of accumulated this following. I can tell you,

anecdotally, I was walking around with the galley for volume four, as I was getting ready to to review it. And someone who I, who I know a little bit, kind of said, oh, you've got volume four. I'm in the middle of volume two. Don't tell me what happens. And there's this kind of like urgency and excitement about this book in which, in some way, it's strictly speaking, nothing, saying the same day, repeats itself. I don't want to spoil it, but by the end of volume four,

it's repeated itself. 3,600. I think I'm 37 times. I think it's important at this point, just take a step back and say some very basic plot details here. This is a book about a woman named Tara Seltar. She lives in France, and she, after taking a trip to try to get some books, she and her husband have a company. They sell antiquarian books, discovers on the 18th of November, that she has woken up again on the 18th of November. And then on the next day, it is still the

18th of November. And she wakes up every day and is reliving the same day. Nobody else in her life is reliving the same day. It is just her. And then there are all these other things you discover about how she moves in the world, how the things that she interacts with, how they

if you had to sort of experience this thing over and over again. Shimana, how did you first come

to these books? I mean, I was just reading them because everybody else in New York was reading them, and I was mildly seasonally depressed. So I did what I usually do and looked to the Scandinavian's

“for comfort and relief. Shimana, nothing that you said just now surprises me. I think it's time for”

me to get off the podcast. One of the interesting things about this book, other in the fact that it is a time-look book that is eventually going to take place over seven volumes is the very unique style here. It is a Tara is writing essentially her life in diary entries. We come into the story if I'm flip right here to the first book on day 121 of her reliving November 18th over and over again. So she's writing her observations. All of the books are through her point of view. There are no

direct quotes as far as I could tell in any of the books. A lot of short paragraphs. It put me and I'd love to hear what it did for you this style in a very hypnotic state where I was drawn along the entire way at times I was bored at times I was gripped. It's fascinating. It's fascinating because boredom is part of the experience of reading the book and it's also the subject of the book

in a way. There's not a lot of emotional intensity in her narration. There's never a moment where

she sort of flings herself on the floor and despair and says, "My God, why can't I get out of this day?" She's very observant. It's a very emotionally muted book and yet there is something gripping about it and something suspense. I mean, every volume is very cleverly sort of leads up to a cliffhanger. So it kind of gets you into the next volume and without saying too much, every volume changes the perspective and the sort of the tenor of the experience while keeping it always. As you say,

in her voice, in her moods and in her kind of very reflective, both practical minded and philosophical take on what's happening to her. So she's sort of using on what this is like, what this is about. You know, it turns out if you take money out of your ATM on November 18th, the next November 18th, it will still be there. But if you buy something from the grocery store on November 18th, it will be gone the next day. Your consumption will subtract it from the world.

“I think that that was a very helpful counter for me. In those moments of boredom was that there was just”

enough world building. God helped me. I'm saying world building. But like to sort of keep things

interesting. And there's there's always a new political or ecological angle. Like it doesn't shock

me knowing what I know about Solvebala that like to her money is so unimportant that it replenishes every day. But like a leak that Tara and her husband grew in their garden is sort of like this precious resource. And she has this refrain about how monstrous she feels. That she's a monster that she's devouring her world that there's this sort of like grotesqueery and like there's something wrong with her. But Tara herself never really makes any kind of moral judgments about why she is there.

But she does feel a lot of culpability while she's frozen in time. And it's interesting because it is

“one of the it comes up. I think it starts to surface you know more more emphatically in the”

later books. But there is a sort of like these ethical questions that about you know this existence. And she'll do things like she'll go and shop at different stores around around whatever town she's in. So she doesn't you know deplete things from the shelves. But she does talk about herself as sort of a predator as a monster as someone who is just taking taking taking resources from the world and and leaving it impoverished. And that you know in in some ways one of the things I think

that you can wonder about as you read these books not only about the sort of the details of the world that they depict. But you know sort of ask yourself well what what kind of allegorical meaning is behind this if this is you know speculative fiction of a kind which it is what's what's the sort of the picture of of our own world that it's trying to reflect back on us. Yeah I mean I had this thought a couple of days ago where I was thinking about the the number

seven about this and I and thinking because each book really does have a different slightly different focus right you know book one you're sort of just like what the hell is going on here book two she's she's traveling around Europe trying to get herself a sense of seasons and I was like oh god

of her designing a different layer of whatever universe she's building I don't know.

“There's something about I mean you use the word world building to this whole thing that I think”

leads anyone who reads these books to sort of start to develop their own theories obviously Tara in the book at some point is trying to figure out what happened why am I here and the experience of reading these four books is just taking me in two directions one you start to think about these world building questions what are the rules and what is allowed and what is not allowed and then in the way that I don't normally do I start to think philosophically which is you know there's

something about time travel time loop stories you know groundhog day a sighted I think seriously by some is like one of the great philosophical films like what does this mean about humanity like what does it mean about the person who has stuck to relive the same day over and over again what is your responsibility to yourself what is your responsibility to the world and so my experience in reading these has sort of been on those two tracks at the same time what are the rules how

are the rules changing and then what does this say about us as people and how we would act or not act in a similar situation one thing that that's been interesting to me that I've been thinking about a lot of people who've written about these books compare them to the great modernist time novels you know to to prudes in search of lost time and to James Joyce's Ulysses right which is because proust is about time in the experience of time but it's about memory it's about the

sense of the past racing away in the on rush of modern civilization in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and Joyce's Ulysses is about all of history all the sort of epic scale of history all in one day condensed into one day in June in Dublin and this is a book about kind of the the loss of the past and of the future so it's it's about a kind of a sense of being stuck

“in this eternal unchanging present in which nonetheless you have to make your life you have to figure”

out what what the sort of human dimensions of your life might be what would it be to live and die your whole life in November 18th and I think I mean I can't help but think about the state of the world of the actual world that we live in and as a certain sense maybe of stuckness or stasis or of of a sort of obscured or clouded future as being some of what these books are about and some of what gives them the kind of this very interesting strong appeal or resonance that we've been talking

about throughout the first two books my brain was thinking for whatever reason oh the thing that will

get Tara unstuck is a romance right like it's so interesting that the sort of the the natural if you're me the natural place to think like okay well what is what's been the counter in in other stories like this like what's been the thing to sort of lift you out of tedium or sort of like give you a shock to the system and it's falling in love and you know that Tara is still very

“devoted to her husband throughout these books and I think that kind of longing for him it's funny”

in the beginning they have something of a honeymoon like a second honeymoon period you know where they're just like he seems like the most patient man on earth or she's like I don't know how to tell you this but I am reliving November 18th over and over and over and she has to tell him this every morning and just kind of goes along with it it's like I guess that's the kind of like absurdity you come to expect when you devote your life to like being an antique book dealer

but I think like I was genuinely shocked when Tara met somebody that was sort of on a similar loop to her and and that felt like such an expansion of possibility and got so exciting and I loved watching like the little societies form it felt like like ancient Greece but November 18th also I just want to dispel because I think there are a lot of like balla heads out there who are like oh like you know it's it's the day Bruce died November 18th and there's a really great interview that

balla did on the LRV podcast and she's like well first I was singing June but that wouldn't really

work with this sort of like environmental thing and so I just sort of and then I thought about October and then I just decided November and then I realized that's when Bruce died so it's like all these people sort of like you know like cryptographers trying to make sense of this and she's just like I just picked it I don't know well it's like it's like you and Genesis it's like you know trying to read as we do with so many works of literature or pieces of art intentionality into things

the day that seemed not too hot not too cold November 18th so you're saying that you don't

“think that balla consciously set out to make herself a god every author is a god of the universe that”

they create coming up the surprising paradox about being stuck in a time loop hey I'm Joelle and I'm Juliet from New York Times Games and we're out here talking to people about games you play New York Times Games yes every day do you have a favorite connections it just makes you think I feel like it gives me a elasticity we eat four groups of four this is actually pretty cool game what's your favorite game the crossword I did in my brother we get says they sometime but I

don't know I couldn't eat that damn way I feel like I'm learning I feel like I'm accomplishing

something I like the do do do do do do do do when you finish it my family does

we're doing we have a huge group chat like my grandma does we're like you're grandma does

“we're doing every day yeah do you have a mortal hot take you should start with the word”

this strategically bad to make it more fun all of these games are so fun because it's like a little five to ten minutes like break I love these games yeah New York Times Games subscribers get full access to all our games and features subscribe now at nytimes.com/games for a special offer Shaman I'd love to talk a little bit more about Tara because you and I felt the same way but in different direction when you talk about well I thought there would be a romance and that would

be a thing that would be you know my and this is my you know pop culture poison brain you know I'm

like what what is what are the things that she is going to do in this book that give it plot like more of a plot in some way is she going to rob a big is she going to fall off a cliff is this

“going to be you know is it's going to be like other sort of time loop stories that we've experienced”

where there's a lot of sort of comical and serial comical death scenes and then she wakes up again and she's still alive but this author's just not interested in that at all and you know that's it like okay that's a great segue into like who Tara really is because Tara really doesn't take pleasure in anything except like kind of squirrelling away notes and she has this sort of fixation on things you know things that stay with her and I totally understand that when especially you're sort of

all of a sudden living in a universe where you don't quite understand why some things stay with you day to day and some things disappear like there is actually a pretty comic tragic comic we can say seen where she goes to her parents house and they have Christmas so they go and like buy a turkey and Christmas pudding and they do the Brussels sprouts and roast potatoes and part of their Christmas tradition is to have leftovers the following day and Tara doesn't think that she doesn't

trust anything to stay in the fridge so she shoves everything and like a refrigerated bag under her bed so that they can at least act like I mean that's that's kind of brilliant you know so she's loyal to tradition in some ways but like she really doesn't take pleasure in food or even when she talks about her relationships with the others in her society I guess like you don't necessarily feel the pleasure that she gets in human connection this is one of the things Antonio want to

hear what you say about this that's has stood out to me most about these books it again I've read the four volumes have been translated into English and look forward to reading the other three but there is I don't know if it's just the way I would feel if I was stuck in time for years and years and years but there is a lack of pleasurable engagement with the world other than in these little flashes like there's one at one point she goes to Spain or Italy or somewhere where she's

looking for a warm weather and she says there were many days and I did and you know and it just passes with ice in them yeah it passes in one or two sentences and and and I as it obviously very normal person and I'm thinking I would try to maximize my pleasure every single day it's true when when you know she does occasionally she and her husband do have sex and volume one but it's not like it's not particularly steamy or or even describe very much but and and you sort of wonder well

what she like this before she got stuck in November like which is cause and which is effect you know is this is this time stuckness a sort of a symptom of or an effect of some alienation from experience that was there already that kind of prepared her for it like is this is this book

an aspect of the of the civilization that's already here say among the educated middle classes

of western countries who kind of maybe already live like this one they see okay I was shocked to find out how old she was when she stumbled through time because I guess I was imagining her in her sixties and I don't know maybe it was because who in their twenties is an antiquarian book dealer I've shocked to learn that she was in her mid-20s when this happened yeah I saw her is being close to my age for some reason so 75 Tony what do you think this structure allows

for both characters to experience and also us as readers to experience what is the effect that living the same day over and over again lands on Tara and on us for Tara it is a sense of a surprising sense of freedom in a way I mean we've talked about it as you know these people being stuck in time which is in one sense true but it's also maybe true that they're free they're sort of liberated in time that's a sort of the linear progression of days that the rest of us are

subject to and have no choice about they can have the same day as many different ways as they

“they want to do it and and I think it also opens up a space I think you were getting to this a”

little earlier Gilbert of sort of philosophical speculation even though Tara is certainly temperamentally inclined to sort of thinking and using and ruminating something about this experience invites that because you're sort of going over and you're looking at it from all these different angles and this sort of the same thing is happening but is happening because you're different each day even if the world is not you sort of see all these kind of nuances and and inflections and

that that I think for the reader makes it interesting and absorbing even when even when it's tedious you know even when you're sort of like there are passages in the book where you know it's sort of

does feel caught in a wheel and is is repeating and nothing new it has happened but I never felt

kind of you know itchy or or border impatient with it I just sort of felt like okay this is this rhythm and within the sort of the confines of this day so much can happen and you start to have so many questions about it you know about about the rules and procedures and I started to feel like every time I would come up with a question all by myself some pages later while I would answer it or would or would tease it or would acknowledge it so there's just a lot of room in these books

and you feel yourself as a reader or I felt as as a reader oddly sort of free in them that I was I was not so much compelled by the the linear movement of a plot as just sort of roaming around in this big space and going into different rooms in this kind of weird giant house which is a very a very pleasant and very soothing reading experience oh sorry I'm looking at a quote here yes okay you know there's an interview that Bala gave to the literary magazine the drift

where she was talking about the title of the book on the calculation of volume she says you know in 1989 I had started this book I was in Paris a friend saw pile of papers the titles on the top

“on the calculation of volume and he said you have to chase a title as a terrible title but she she”

very briefly talks about quote the time loop creates more of a space or a room then the usual view of time as a line or river or even as a circle it's sort of this the more she lives this day over and over again the bigger the volume of her time that she is living sort of grows and

grows until maybe she'll never be able to calculate it in the end but it's quite big I was also

really struck by the relationships between there's one time looper who is kind of grateful for this pause because it allows him to have time with his father who has Parkinson's and so and his father's disease actually doesn't seem to be progressing in this period so it's almost like putting a pause on a degenerative disease but at the same time there's another looper who is an entire ocean

“away from his kid and and those are really like the the most like wrenching I think philosophical”

questions I found that a very poignant part as well it's interesting too that and this is remarked

19th world I think it's interesting to try to think of Tony as you know why are there

no children that they have found at by the end of book four why are they all sort of seemingly in the same sort of socio economic sort of racial cohort like there is something interesting about the similarities between by the end of book four all of the people yeah and and and that that

“I think is is one of the really interesting things that develops in in in in in the fourth volume”

because it it does sort of re-situate this whole experience on a kind of a collective or social level you know so it's it's it's now there's there's a there are a lot of them we sort of lose count

you know um there are at the end of book three I think there are four and then all of a sudden

they're nine and then more and more and they have these house meetings and then they they kind of have a convention of all of all of the november 18th and it's I mean and it's one of the comical sort of logistic things about like how do you how do you rent a hall for a convention that's today but but not the today to the you know it's it's like the thing where whenever Tara travels she arrives in it in a in a new city and goes to hotel and asks for a room

“that hasn't been occupied the night before which is a great precaution but also just absurd”

and apparently all the people at all the hotels in Europe are like oh yeah okay we can we can do that I I also shuttered a thing how long it would have taken me to figure that out like how many strangers I would have been at next week up next week in the hotel room I mean we're just sort of big guard at what this is just awful Tony can I ask you as as we near the end of this conversation you know in terms of generic expectations and in these books fall outside of genre in so many ways

you know the the framing for this both in the way that it is being sold and the way I've described it to people and the way that people talked about when they interview her is is Groundhog Day the film starring Bill Murray and Andy McDowell from 1993 when you say a time loop you can also say it's a it's a real Groundhog Day type situation and I'm wondering as someone who was a film critic for almost a quarter century you know what what that framing sort of led you to to think as you

entered these books and how you think other people navigate between those two how are they doing yeah I mean Groundhog Day has this sort of romantic comedy structure as Jamana as you were saying and it's about it turns out to be about getting it right like when the Bill Murray character is worthy of the love of the Andy McDowell character he will be free you know so it's it's what the philosopher and film writer Stanley Kavell called moral perfectionism that's the plot of that

movie it's about getting yourself right and understanding yourself and it's a Hollywood story so it's an individual story it's only happening to him and it only matters that it's happening to him this is something else because the redoing it doesn't seem to impose any kind of purpose or logic

“or responsibility on people I don't think it's it's it's it's much more it turns out to be I think”

much more about what this would be as a general human condition so it starts out as an individual story but it and Tara is our narrator and and I assume we'll stay our narrator but it isn't really

her story and it's not really about who she is in some ways we never know we still don't know

really who she is but it's about what it is to live in time and whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing what it would feel like to to have your whole sense of your orientation forward in time changed or or taken away I think it would be a great thing my favorite part so far in these four books is when the character Henry on the first or second day realizes that he has time to catch up on his emails that seems like something I would do I thought he was great I've enjoyed living in this

time with the two of you Tony Scott thank you so much for joining the pod such a pleasure I'm sorry that it has to come to an end after the break she modded dates into the world of literary translation and she recommends some books for you to read next okay Jumana these on the calculation

in books three and four I pair of translators take over Sophia Hersey Smith in Jennifer Russell and I'm curious about two things what is your understanding of how authors and translators work together and then this phenomenon or the situation where two people are working on translating one book that that saves quite difficult to make but it worked clearly in in these two volumes that we read yeah and it does work I mean I can think Sam that and David Boyd translate from Japanese into English

they're great they're an amazing pair they they were the ones who worked on the first books by

Miyako Kawakami to come into English and she's obviously still something of a sensation among and what is she right um she's the author of breasts and eggs heaven she has a new sort of noir out called sisters in yellow they did not work on that book and I did feel that frankly

“but to your earlier question about how translators and authors work together I think it”

I mean I think it really depends so first a lot of translators have worked on books or work by dead people so that's kind of a non-starter oh I remember I was profiling and Goldstein who is Elena Ferante's translator and I asked her I was like how often do you like email her or do you ever email her directly and she's like I've emailed her directly maybe five times but anytime I have a query most of the time I go through her editor and so that's my understanding of how it works

most of the time this is a very specific question for you but I feel like you might actually have an answer you know there are people that have like favorite audiobook narrators yep is it do you have a favorite translator I do can I tell you about him I love him so much is his name is Frank Winn

“he W-I-N-N-E he is an Irish I think Savant right he's just a genius he translates from Spanish”

in French and I first encountered him when I was reading um Viljani Dipont who's a sort of like post-punk French writer and all of her writing whether it's her non-fiction or her novels are extremely voice-driven she has this sort of like feminist manifesto called King Kong theory and he

really was an incredible conduit for her voice and she has this trilogy of books that I think

everybody should read Vilma on Supertex it's about a sort of unemployed record dealer just bouncing around the right bank of Paris meeting a bunch of very colorful characters and just the way that he's able to juggle all these voices is amazing and like everything's so alive they feel very expansive those books okay Jumana what other books and translation would you recommend from this vast wild in sourcing universe so big so as a specific comp for on the calculation of volume I'm going to

recommend time shelter this is by a Bulgarian writer Yorgie Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodal this one the International Booker in 2023 and this is about a clinic in Zurich that's set up for Alzheimer's patients where each floor of the facility recreate a different decade and so wherever they kind of live in their head they can they can have their physical reality match their memories it's really good wow okay it's a great idea another recent discovery for me was Yuko Tsushima so the

book that I love most by her is territory of light and this is translated by Geraldine Harcourt

“Geraldine Harcourt I think maybe only ever translated Yuko Tsushima and I wish she had translated”

everything because like I mean this is one of the most incredible books I've read and I would say at least

yet last 18 months it's about a single mom and her four-year-old daughter getting their own apartment in Tokyo and just like rebuilding their life together after the inclusion of her marriage and it's so elegant and funny and surprising and and beautifully rendered into English I love that book another one okay classics are a blind spot for me like I really really need to go reread like classics and quotes class yeah okay yeah what what is classics out of quotes I don't know

like Trigigno and all the you know Anna Karen and I but I did just finish an Italian classic that I

“really liked it's called the Betrothed in English in Italian it's an Iprometi sposi by Alessandro”

Menzoni who is one of the first writers like around the time that Italy decided to unify its language

and it's a classic love story it's a parable it's a political parable it's a societal parable

“but it's also just a lovely translation that's translated by Michael F. Moore who's translations”

from Italian in English I highly recommend and then another one that I love I'd love this book this is Cairo by Jenny Irp and back who's German all of her books are great go went gone etc so Cairo was translated by Michael Hoffman and is a very very nuanced and complex I guess you could just call it an age gap novel relationship age gap novel it's really good. Jumana I I say this with

genuine sincerity I always feel smarter after hearing you talk about books. Thank you it was

“genuinely my pleasure I could go for 20 more minutes. I think we're good. Okay the book review is”

produced by Sarah Diamond and Amy Pearl it's edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed this week by Katie McMurren original music by Dan Powell and Alicia but YouTube special thanks to Dahlia Hedat we want to hear what you think about the show so send us an email at the book review at nytimes.com I'm Gilbert Cruz thanks for listening 18 year olds don't know groundhog day what the what's happening

I've never seen it you've never seen it should I watch it

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