Anxiety about the Present
Lately I've found myself overcome by a real sense of anxiety about the future, partly, I think, because I've reached a point of relative contentment in my life that makes me newly aware of how precarious everything actually is: how I might lose the people and things I love most, my husband, my family, all of it, and how uncertain the long-term security of my job and housing feels. I also worry about the larger state of the world and the future of the planet, and it all feels like the only real antidote is trying to live in the moment and be grateful for what you have, which is a genuinely hard thing to do.
I'll admit to a slightly ridiculous version of this anxiety too: as a reader, I worry about not having time to read all the books I want to read. Years ago I was on a flight reading Vestal McIntyre's wonderful novel "Lake Overturn" during a stretch of terrifying turbulence, and while everyone around me panicked, the thought running through my head was simply that I wouldn't get to finish the book if the plane went down. I've never actually been afraid of flying, since it feels so entirely out of my control that worrying about it seems pointless, but that moment stuck with me.
The Fourth Volume
All of which is a roundabout way into talking about the book I've just finished here: the fourth instalment of "On the Calculation of Volume", this great, ongoing epic still being published in parts, following Tara as she remains caught in a time loop on the 18th of November. What I find so poignant about this series isn't just the plot or its larger questions about time, but the fact that it's being published incrementally, so that reading it alongside my own life lets me notice how much I've changed since the first volume came out, and how much has stayed exactly the same. That structure makes the book's examination of how we inhabit and move through time feel more resonant, a reminder that worrying so much about the future can mean losing the present entirely, even while watching a character who relives the same day yet still changes in small, incremental ways.
Tara keeps a diary throughout, becoming steadily more aware of her own incremental change, and it made me wonder whether I'd actually be content reliving the same day forever, given how fundamental it is to life that things change, that we make choices we can't take back. She's also acutely conscious of using up the resources around her as she moves through the world, which felt like an apt parallel for the wider, collective anxiety so many of us carry about depleting the planet's resources while still having to go on living our lives.
A Growing Community
This volume shifts more toward a collective perspective. It's a bit of a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read the earlier books, but by this point Tara isn't alone: there's a whole group of people caught in the 18th of November, developing their own routines, their own culture, even their own language for inhabiting this state, setting themselves apart from everyone else living in normal, forward-moving time. Many of them wrestle with the sense that they must have done something to cause their own entrapment, even though nobody understands why any of this is happening and no one has any real control over it. I loved a line from a character named Olga, who says “The world is not a calm sea where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat... the world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.” It struck me as such an honest way of thinking about life: that we can't fully control our own fates, and learning to live with that is the real task.
The novel is full of individual responses to this same situation: one character, dear to my heart, uses the time to finally read all the books she's always wanted to get to; others find unexpected love and want to stay; others are desperate to escape and rejoin the normal flow of time; another has a terminally ill relative and uses the repetition to savor time with them, caught in the impossible tension of never quite being able to let go. Tara finds a kind of contentment within this community while knowing it can't be sustained forever, that tensions will rise and people will come and go.
Identity, Individual and Collective
What I found most fascinating here is how the book treats identity: on our own we feel like distinct individuals, everything we do an expression of our own personality, but as part of a larger group we become something more like an amalgam, without a fully singular identity. It made me think about how much of who we are is actually shaped by the communities and relationships we're embedded in, and how even our own thoughts are often just other people's ideas recombined. It also brought to mind those moments of apparent coincidence, running into someone from an entirely different context, that turn out to have a fairly logical explanation once you consider how people who share interests or circumstances tend to end up in the same places. This volume's exploration of identity as something both individual and collective felt genuinely moving to sit with.
Beyond that, there's plenty of plot movement too, including the community starting to grow plants during their repeating day, and, like every book in this series, it ends on a real cliffhanger that has me eager for the next volume.
A Small Reservation, and a Ranking
I understand readers who find the series a bit gimmicky, both in its structure and in how it's being parceled out over time rather than published as one long book, and I do think there's a commercial logic to that. But I've also found real value in reading it exactly this way, unable to consume it all in one sitting, and in being able to look back at the different points in my own life when each volume came out. Ranking the series so far: book one is still my favorite, with books two and four close behind and extremely strong in their own right; book three I liked but felt it meandered a little more than the others.
Verdict
I loved reading this while I was on holiday in Scotland looking out at a gorgeous landscape. This volume's meditation on how we inhabit the present, how our identities form individually and collectively, and how we move through time landed with real force for me. If you've been reading this series, or are curious to start it, or have had a similar experience following any long-running series across years of your own life, I'd love to hear about it.
