Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume is a planned septology about a Danish antiquarian book dealer who falls out of time, and the first five volumes are one of the most original and brilliant literary projects I've read in years. The premise is the one you have seen a hundred times. The protagonist, Tara Selter, wakes up on the eighteenth of November. The day passes. She goes to sleep. She wakes up. It is the eighteenth of November. Her husband Thomas, who lives with her in a stone house in northern France, has no memory of the previous iteration. She does. It takes a familiar science fiction idea and makes it feel fresh, intimate, and deeply human. I read all five over a week in San Sebastian, sitting in the bright Atlantic light of the Basque coast while reading about a woman who can't leave a single grey rainy day in northern France, and the books were only better for the contrast. Mild spoiler warning: I'll describe the shape of each book but not its turns. Skip to the bottom if you want to come to the cycle clean.

The first volume is the small one, around two hundred pages, minimalist in both plot and prose. The minimalism is the point. Tara has returned to Clairon-sous-Bois from a book fair in Paris with a small burn on her hand from a hotel heater and a Roman sestertius in her bag, and we meet her on day one hundred and twenty-two of the loop. By then she has the day memorized to the second. The blackbird sings at the same instant every morning. The cup is where she left it. Thomas, beautifully indifferent to the cosmological catastrophe he is sleeping through, asks her about her trip. She tells him. He listens. He has listened a hundred and twenty-two times. There is something sisyphean about a marriage where one of you has to begin the conversation again from scratch every morning. The writing here is the kind of plain prose that takes a whole career to learn how to write. Short sentences. Present tense. Almost no metaphor. A naturalist's field notebook, kept by someone who has begun to understand that the field is closing in. Barbara J. Haveland's English translation is so unobtrusive you forget the book was written in another language. Volume I is a phenomenology textbook in the disguise of a novel, and the disguise is so good that the textbook keeps surprising you with feeling.

A year passes inside the day, and in the second volume Tara goes traveling. She has worked out by then that the eighteenth restarts wherever she happens to be sleeping, so she can take the loop with her. She rides trains. She crosses Europe. She follows snow up to Norway and crepuscular light down to the south, anything that might serve as evidence of the season she has been denied. The trick of Volume II is that it is a travelogue turned inside out. The world is supposed to be the still backdrop against which the traveler moves. Here the traveler is the still one. She is the same November eighteenth wherever she goes. It is the world that keeps shifting under her, a palimpsest written and overwritten on the same Wednesday, and the shifts are rendered so attentively that the book becomes a slow, hallucinatory survey of how light behaves in different latitudes when the same day is happening to it. The sestertius travels with her, opening into a lovely tangent about the Roman empire and the routes its money once took, and by the end of the book Tara's senses have sharpened to a pitch where the prose itself begins to breathe differently. The world, she writes, is whispering in a new language. Her husband, who appears in this volume mostly as someone she telephones from foreign hotels, has begun to feel the strain of being loved by a woman who is aging at a rate his calendar refuses to acknowledge.

And then, in the third volume, the project does something nobody saw coming. Tara meets someone else. His name is Henry Dale. He is a sociologist. He has been inside the day longer than she has, and he has a young son in America whom he visits every loop at his ex-wife's house. Imagine being four years old and meeting your father every morning, knowing he is the same and knowing also that he carries with him a freight of time you cannot see. The book never over-stresses the heartbreak, letting it sit the way it lets everything sit. Tara and Henry try to figure out what they are to each other. The volume is, in part, about how dignified people behave when the universe has made them, against their will, into a liminal society of two. Then Olga arrives, with her plan to reorganize the loop into a fairer society. Then Ralf, with his plan to spend each iteration of the day stopping every preventable accident on the planet. The four of them have nothing in common except the day, and the novel is too honest to pretend that the day is enough. The marriage with Thomas has by now become the book's quietest engine of dread. Tara is older. Thomas is not. Every morning he wakes up younger than the woman who has come home to him.

By Volume IV they have moved into a big house outside Bremen, and the four have become fifty. Volume IV does something I have rarely seen at this scale in serious literary fiction. The singular voice breaks. The careful "I" of the first three books gradually, and then unmistakably, becomes a "we," and the book begins to read like extended meeting minutes from the most interesting commune ever convened. The residents argue about everything. They argue about what to call themselves. They argue about whether the day should be measured from sunrise or from the moment of arrival. They argue about food, because food consumed inside the loop is gone from the loop forever, and a population of fifty is a meaningful pull on a finite breakfast. They argue about healthcare in a world where every wound resets at midnight. They argue, in other words, about the load-bearing architecture of any society, and they argue at a pace and an articulacy that is recognizably the kind of conversation that only happens when people have nothing to lose and everything to figure out. The whole project is apophatic, an attempt to build a vocabulary for their condition by exhaustively naming what it is not. The volume keeps the metaphysics inside the kitchen. The questions about language and identity never float free of the bread. Someone is always doing the dishes. The book ends on a hinge I will not describe, except to say that it earns the turn.

Volume V is the settling. The exhilaration of Volume IV gives way to something stranger and gentler, the texture of a second life slowly making itself plausible. The community has habits now. Some of the loopers have begun to write. Some have begun to teach. Some have figured out, the way people figure out anything important, that you can build a tolerable existence on a foundation of repetition if you stop arguing with the foundation. New arrivals appear at the door, and the work of welcoming them, of explaining the day to a stranger who has just discovered they are inside it, becomes a kind of vocation. The central insight of the cycle, after five books, clarifies itself. The project is the great novel of dailiness. Joyce gave us one Dublin day at six hundred pages of close attention. The series is the same Wednesday written eleven hundred times over, and somehow still not done. Not a novel that contains daily life among its themes. A novel about the daily as such. The eighteenth of November is the prosaic distilled into philosophy. Mornings. Bread. Light at a window. The same conversation begun gently for the thousandth time. What a life is, these five volumes suggest, when you take away the future and you take away the past, and you are left with the present examined at the resolution of a Vermeer. Book VI arrives in May 2027, with one more to follow. The engine, after five books, shows no sign of fatigue, and the project keeps getting larger by getting smaller.

I recommend these books to anyone who keeps a notebook and wants a beautiful, quiet, understated meditation on life wrapped in metaphysical curios. Anyone who has written down what the morning light looked like on a particular Wednesday and felt slightly embarrassed about doing it. Anyone whose work involves going back to the same thing over and over until it finally starts to make sense. If you have ever caught yourself cataloging the way your kitchen table looks at six in the morning and felt something that was neither boredom nor revelation but a third thing, calmer than both, then Solvej Balle has written the books you did not know were possible, and she has written five of them and is still going. They are, sentence by sentence, some of the most beautiful prose being published anywhere right now. They are also, taken together, a serious and unembarrassed meditation on time, on selfhood, on what a person is when she is no longer accumulating history, and on what a marriage is when only one of you is aging into it. Tara cannot leave the eighteenth of November. None of us can leave today either. Eternal recurrence treats this as a test. The absurd treats it as a climb. Balle treats it as a practice. The prosaic, attended to, is the depth. The repetition, accepted, is the meaning. The measure of a life is one you would say yes to twice, and these books leave you wondering whether her one day, lived a billion times, is really so different from our own lives.