A former colleague reminded me of the babysitting job I was given by a newspaper editor some forty years ago. I was the court reporter, covering every level from city police court to the New York Court of Appeals, plus the federal court in the beautiful Art Deco building on Broadway in downtown Albany. An exchange program with an English-language newspaper in Pakistan permitted a young reporter from that country to shadow me for several weeks. His name was Hassan Jafri. He accompanied me on my rounds and I introduced him to judges, attorneys, secretaries, police officers, law clerks and courtroom hangers-on.  One day we were sitting in police court (generally, the most entertaining of the venues I covered), waiting for the action to start. Most of our talk up to this point had been professional, with me briefing him on such things as journalistic standards in the U.S. compared to Pakistan and the constitutional basics. Hassan told me that before flying to Albany from Karachi, he had visited Baltimore. Relatives, I assumed. No, he was making a pilgrimage of sorts, not religious but literary. He wanted to visit three “shrines”:   Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, the H.L. Mencken House and the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald and his family lived while he completed Tender Is the Night. Hassan was more deeply and appreciatively read in American literature than most of my fellow native-born reporting and editing colleagues. I was surprised and delighted. I could talk books with a guy from the other side of the world. I felt a certain patriotic shame remembering the words attributed to Mencken:   “The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.”

At Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen, I see a passport fall out of the back pocket of a man and immediately (at least) three strangers call out.

The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a November. The nineteenth never appears. On the 121st iteration of the same day she begins to write by describing the sounds made by her husband Thomas as he moves around upstairs. The same moves, the same noises every day. A simple premise and very promising, but very difficult to turn into a compelling narrative. If everything she sees and hears is going to be the same from one day to the next, variation or resolution can only undermine the conceit, making the novel the diary of an anecdote, essentially a ghost story,1 but if there is no variation or resolution, boredom and impatience are inevitable. And the novel is indeed fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, as the premise gives the reader an existential thrill imagining what such a condition might entail while also wondering how the constraint on the story will develop, and perhaps even resolve, but frustrating because there are only so many meditations on a regular day one can read. The novel is filled out with Tara's precise observations of her surroundings and descriptions of the events leading up to the "rift in time", a level-headed attention suggested by the title, all of which may be interesting in context, but not otherwise. However, any longueurs are mitigated when, longing for a world in which time passes, she tries to reach the nineteenth. She interrupts Thomas' routine and explains the situation in the hope that he will be able to lead her into the next day, but by morning he has to be told all over again. However, this does have its unique joys: We woke in the morning, we went for walks, we sat down and had coffee somewhere on the eighteenth of November. For most of the day as intimately aware of one another as couples in the first flush of love or nearsighted creatures. We made the horizon vanish. We sought this giddy feeling. The distance between us was dispelled in the fog. We made the giddiness a part of our day. Created a bright space out of dazed, gray confusion. The reader nevertheless is impatient for a resolution and spins the hands of the clock forward enabled by the smooth translation of Balle's uncluttered prose, only to discover on closing the book that there is a serenity in the stability of Tara's infinite crisis, and now that serenity is gone. This may be why there are several more volumes ahead, just as there is always another book to read. Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland Part one of On the Calculation of Volume has been reviewed widely and made the International Booker Prize shortlist and came top of the Shadow Panel's vote.2 While many of the reviews place the novel within a generic tradition and cite one of the most famous novels about time as a literary predecessor, not one review that I've found recognises the significance of the apparently random date chosen for Tara to explore. Had they wondered why a Danish author chose to write a multi-volume novel about time from the perspective of a French woman, they may have discovered that the eighteenth of November is the day in 1922 on which the author of À la recherche du temps perdu died.3 There are other parallels: Tara's experience at the beginning of the rift is a neat inversion of Proust's narrator at the beginning of that novel: each morning he wakes in uncertainty to reconstruct reality from forgetful sleep, while she wakes to a sense of peace as the normality of another morning appears, only for its normality to dissolve. And when she tells Thomas everything and they stay awake all night hoping the nineteenth will appear in an entirely new dawn, a sudden imperceptible loss of concentration leads to him losing the memory of the day, a moment that reverses Proust's famous instants. Perhaps then this is a novel written from the end of time, from the blank space of death or, less morbidly, from eternity. For Nietzsche, eternity is precisely the revelation of time. In the face of relentless change, the serene stability of the novel is the ideal form to enable an experience of time in relation to eternity. This may explain why the rise of the novel coincided with the decline of faith and the disenchantment of the world: if poetry is the gift of eternity, the novel is the gift of time, and the novels of Proust and Solvej Balle seek to merge both in the flux of imagination and reality.4     David Lowery's movie A Ghost Story springs to mind here. A dead husband haunts the house he shared with his wife and watches from afar.↩ See the Booker Prize website and the Shadow Panel's Substack report. The latter tends to more reliable in purely literary terms as it's not driven by corporate demands.↩ A letter to the TLS mentions it in response to a review, but much is behind the paywall.↩ There is another connection, not film or book related. In the thinking of the experience of the same day and the fog obscuring the movement of the days, I remembered seeing J Mascis and the Fog perform the song Sameday live in Brighton many years ago. The Fog that night featured Mike Watt of Minutemen (and later the underrated Firehose) and Ron Asheton of The Stooges. ↩

How C. F.  Seabrook became the Lear of the vegetable fields The post The Unjolly Green Giant appeared first on The American Scholar.

Metempsychosis is another word I learned from Ulysses. Up till then I used the more plebian-sounding reincarnation. In the fourth chapter, “Calypso,” Molly Bloom is in bed reading a novel, Ruby: Pride of the Ring. She encounters metempsychosis in the text and asks Leopold, who has been serving her tea and toast, what it means. She fumbles the pronunciation and Joyce later puts a pun in her mouth: “met him pike hoses.” The word shows up in three other chapters and is a theme -- ever-changing forms -- in the novel.  In the Winter 2006 issue of Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, the poet, painter and translator Nicholas Kilmer published “Fragments from a Correspondence,” a selection from the letters written to him by Guy Davenport between 1978 and 1983. Davenport had died the previous year. Kilmer is the grandson of the poet Joyce Kilmer, author of “Trees,” killed by a sniper’s bullet during the Second Battle of the Marne. Davenport knew as much about Ulysses (among other things) as anyone I have known. In a letter dated Sept. 6, 1980, he writes to Kilmer:   “Your theory of metempsychosis through things. It explains so much. I know drab people who have been tenement sinks and public water fountains in Arkansas. I may well have been the Wright Brothers Flyer No. 1. You know my theory that I'm a janitor in all my activities? I janitor, for instance, the Kenyon Review; and my writing is all simply the tidying up of the Modern Period, a bit of string here neatly rolled up, scraps of notes thrown away by Joyce, things dropped by Ez Pound. So I must have been a janitor sometime.”   Davenport is joking, sort of, but the theme of forms changing and evolving across time is recurrent in his essays and fiction. Among the aphorisms of the pre-Socratic philosopher Herakleitos he translated is this: “Change alone is unchanging.” And this: “Everything flows; nothing remains. [Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]” He borrows the title of his 1987 essay collection, Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays, from Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. In a footnote to the excerpt from Davenport’s letter, Kilmer explains: “My theory of metempsychosis is that, all things having souls, we shuttle back and forth between animal, vegetable and mineral.”   [The Herakleitos quotes come from Davenport’s Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979; included in 7 Greeks, New Directions, 1995).