Something struck me as I read this third book in a planned series of seven: how discursive it is. Volume 3 (see what I did there?) opens with Tara Salter, who has been stuck in 19 November, Goundhog Day-like, for two books, obsessing about Romans. She stumbled across a lecture at a university in Düsseldorf, and has been researching the subject ever since. She has the time to do so. By this point, references to Groundhog Day are just stating the obvious, but this book does seem more like the movie than the earlier two books, especially where Bill Murray’s characters spends the same day over and over again learning how to become a virtuoso piano player in order to impress Andie McDowell, the woman he fancies.
Having said that, there’s no romance in On the Calculation of Volume III (2021, Denmark). Tara is happily married, although temporally separated from her husband. Her interest in the Romans leads her to Henry, who is in the same situation as her, trapped in 19 November. They spend time together, learn about each other. Henry introduces Tara to another person in the same situation, a young woman, Olga, who is searching for a young man she knows like them. Henry has also been spending a lot of time in the US, visiting his son.
Olga and her companion, Ralf, who is currently missing, have different ideas about how to make use of the fact they’re trapped in a single day. Ralf wants to use it to prevent accidents – which again reminds of a specific incident in Groundhog Day, when Murray saves a man using the Heimlich.
After finding Ralf, the four move into a house on the outskirts of Bremen. When another nine people in the same situation suddenly arrive.
It’s like there’s a sudden shift in gear two-thirds of the way through this book. Tara considers her growing occupation with the Romans, and then the differences in philosophy between Olga and Ralf, and then suddenly they’re coming up with a plan to do something useful, and then a whole bunch of people turn up out of the blue… That initial discursiveness is one of the appeals of the series: Tara’s thoughtful consideration of her situation, her careful working out of its boundaries, is one of the reasons why the books work so well. But that isn’t very dramatic – especially for a planned seven (quite short) novels. Tara has spent two books exploring the limits of her November 19, but now the story needs to explore its limits – by introducing more characters.
I’m enjoying these, and I certainly plan to continue reading them. IV is currently available, but I’m waiting for it to drop in price; V will be published later this year. And, I assumed, VI and VII next year. Worth reading.
