Thrilling ... The time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions ... Doesn’t present the time loop solely as a problem to be solved but as a condition of being alive. Who hasn’t walked through a day oblivious to the fact that it’s the beginning or the end of a certain type of day?
At once scrupulously realistic and intriguingly speculative. Balle succeeds in conveying the texture of Tara’s changing feelings, her shifting moods ... There are flashes of allegorical designs here, but in the main the novel’s propulsive imaginative brilliance lies in Tara’s metaphoric search for a language with which to communicate the sheer incomprehensibility of her condition.
It is a marvel that these short books contain so much—so many ways of measuring time and its effects, meditations on consumption and destruction, the quantum mechanics of love, the persistence of history and memory, the strange behavior of things in the world, how details appear at molecular and cosmic levels. But overall this is a work about writing, an act that is dependent, of course, on time.
Miraculous ... It’s a speculative masterwork ... These initial volumes are deceptively unassuming and compact at under 200 pages each, distilling the peculiarity of being into its most concentrated essence ... What we read is a record of her noticing.
In Haveland’s rendering, Balle’s stripped-down prose has an understated clarity that lends philosophical resonance to this fantastical setup. Both of these volumes move swiftly; their briefness (each is less than 200 pages) is at odds with the feeling of unendingness that attends Tara’s predicament.
Haveland’s translation also captures the twitchy urge to both keep moving and seek the comforts of home. A speculative, lyrical study of our sensory self.
