Om uträkningen av omfång 6 by Solvej Balle
I try to go to bed early. I read and reread the same paragraph until it slides off the page. I drop my phone, hear it hit the floor, and suddenly I’m asleep. I wake up at 11:37pm, alert and uncomfortable, shift around, and back to sleep. At 1:53am I’m up again. I get my phone from under the bed, rotate it a few times, and unlock the screen on page 226. I stare at the tiny white letters, blinking until they hold still. The background is black, and with the screen brightness on the lowest setting I can make out the words without waking Alina. This is how I read most of the time—in the middle of the night and on my phone. Usually the library app, but this book I bought so I have to use a different app. For the last few nights, the new app has congratulated me for meeting my daily reading goals. It makes me smile. It seems to take about two pages before the app determines the goal has been met, but I don’t know how it calculates or what kind of progress it has planned for me. Still, its expectations seem low.
I don’t have a reading goal. I have a sleeping goal if anything, and reading is what I do instead. Hours go by while I swipe the miniature pages. I’m reading Om uträkningen av omfång 6 by Solvej Balle. One through three I read in English, switching to Swedish on volume four. I often highlight a word to look it up, and a list of explanations and elaborations appear in an even smaller typeface, dark gray and barely visible against the black. As it turns out, one or two discernable words almost always suffices as a definition.
As a night reader, I’m comforted by multiple volumes. They wait helpfully on their digital shelf. If I have enough books, it doesn’t matter even if I don’t sleep at all. If I read long enough, I get hungry and go to the kitchen and eat crackers in the dark. Then back to bed, and my book, which is also my phone.
I like the narrator, the main character of these books. Tara Selter. She sells antiquarian books, and when things go wrong with time and she gets trapped in the 18th of November, she starts to sleep with books and Christmas hams and other odds and ends in the bed with her. She sleeps in boat houses, potting sheds, and greenhouses. Objects have to be close to her at night if she wants to keep them when the day resets and begins again. But it doesn’t always work. Anything on the computer gets erased, and cell phones eventually stop working. Emails unsend themselves. Tara has a Roman coin, a sestertius, that stays with her for a long time. She might still have it in this volume, but it hasn’t come up in a while.
The biggest obstacle is poetic language. You’d think technical or scientific terms would be the hardest, but it’s actually the flowery and elliptical descriptions of emotions or nature. What do the words mean? Whole paragraphs can go by without leaving any lasting impression. Balle’s language mostly stays in place, though I’ve looked up the word for slope at least five times. The name of the Milky Way in Swedish is the winter street. Tara pointed that out in one of the earlier volumes. She had a stargazing phase.
So have I. Tara’s succession of fixations propels the story forward. I was drifting away slightly but then she became very taken with the ancient history of grains. The Romans hated rye passionately. Tara thought about this a lot, how they actually found it disgusting. I thought about it a lot too, for a while. Time goes by, but unknown topics and intriguing facts await. Other hobbies, different obsessions, volumes that aren’t even published yet.