Consider the following claim: at some point in the next decade, a Scandinavian author will pen a cycle of novels with six or more entries, and the series will sweep the English-language literary world. This is an inductive conclusion. It extends a pattern observed in the past into a future we have not yet seen. To assess the strength of the claim, we must turn to our “samples”—the various manifestations of our supposedly general pattern. There are three to consider.

1. In the early 2010s, My Struggle, a dreadfully serious autofictional hexology, broke through in the Anglophone sphere. Its author, Karl Ove Knausgård, was and is prototypically Norwegian. One imagines he writes with a raven perched on his shoulder.
2. In the early 2020s, John Fosse’s Septology, an aptly titled seven-part epic that unspools, hypnotically, in the form of a single gestating sentence, took English-language readers by storm. The culprit, once more, was Norwegian, although Fosse’s writing is gentler than Knausgård’s, more lake than fjord, the work of an Odin who’s aged out of warfare. 
3. Most recently, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, a meditative septology with the hook of an airport potboiler (Volume’s protagonist, Tara Selter, is stuck in a time loop), has become the talk of the literary town. Balle is, requisitely, Scandinavian (she moved to the secluded Danish island of Aerø in 2005 to shape Volume’s seven entries), but her speculative epic throws a wrench in our forecasting. Above all, Volume is a philosophical exercise, designed to challenge the most basic principle of induction: that the future will resemble the past. 

Critiques of induction predate Balle, of course. The problem, as David Hume observed in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1973), is that our attempts to justify induction as a basis for knowledge are inevitably circular. Lurking behind any inductive conclusion—say, “the sun will rise tomorrow”—is a premise some deem the “Uniformity of Nature,” which posits that the laws of time and space are constant, that the unobserved resembles the observed. This premise has a remarkable track record—the sun does keep on rising, gravity does keep on working, etc.—but can we accept it on these grounds alone? Hume thinks not. “Induction will work in the future because it’s always worked in the past” is itself an inductive argument. We cannot prove the Uniformity of Nature; we can only cling to it blindly, hungrily, illogically.

But wait, the scientists cry—Hume’s conclusion is unworkable! How could we give up on the laws of nature? What would it even look like for induction to fail? Enter Solvej Balle, on her island, with a four-pound sheaf of manuscripts.

Tara, too, is on an island. She’s sequestered herself in a back room of her two-story cottage, a quiet, undisturbed space with a window “overlooking the garden.” She can hear her husband, Thomas, through the walls. She does not go to him. For 120 days, she’s been reliving the eighteenth of November: she knows when the rain will come, when the faucets will switch on, when the birds will gather by the sill. Even Thomas has become a clockwork man. He is a dot; he is a thing that shuffles in the kitchen. Tara, on her tapered graft of time, spirals ever outwards from him. 

Volume I, then, is the story of a marriage sliding slowly, almost dulcetly, off course. There is at first false hope: early in the endless autumn, Tara clings to Thomas, and Thomas clings to her. They are “nearsighted creatures,” and “the distance between us,” Tara writes, “was dispelled in the fog.” Tara wakes beside her husband, and tells him of her “rift in time,” and they float on until the sun sets. None of it can last. “Our love has always been microscopic,” Tara writes, a little sadly, from her hidden room. “It is something in the cells.” A love forged on this scale can weather the melodramatic shocks of your average marriage novel, but it cannot survive the asynchronies that accumulate, like baby teeth, at the edges of the loop. Some things stay when the day resets (journal entries, food when eaten, books when kept beneath the bed), and some things fly back to their preestablished places (eggshells, grocery bags, a Roman sestertius). Nothing behaves as it should.

These discrepancies, these broken patterns, shake the lovers from their “foggy days.” They search, now, for an explanation. They experiment. They try staying up all night (no dice—Tara blips back into the loop, and her husband is left dazed and oblivious). They devise “theories and frameworks,” they “note… down observations” and “come up with rules” that might describe them. In other words, they go in for induction. 

Belle, here, is addressing the groundhog in the room. Tara might not act like Phil Connors—she doesn’t crash her car or save a life or pick up ice sculpting or really ever do anything particularly exciting—but films like “Groundhog Day” have primed us to expect a logical explanation for (and conclusion to) any time loop narrative. Tara is afforded no such closure. “We could not find the reason why time had fallen apart,” she writes. “There was no reason.” And so she drifts from Thomas, day by day. When the distance becomes unbearable, she makes her writerly retreat. She—we—are left with

the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.

This is, by design, an excellent and lyrical evocation of Hume’s challenge to induction. By the end of Volume I, Tara has lost faith in the Uniformity of Nature. The question of the novel’s closing third—and of its six sequels—is how she might come to live without it.

Alexander Margulis is a contributing writer and section head for Second Look.