CS Your septology, On the Calculation of Volume, the first two volumes of which have just been translated into English by Barbara J Haveland, follows the story of Tara Selter, an antiquarian book dealer trapped in an endlessly repeating day: November 18. What inspired the idea for the book? Does it have to do with the fact that you live on a small island? 

SB I wasn’t living on an island then but in Copenhagen, but by the time I really started writing I was on another island. I never thought that it might have been the island that did it, but maybe it was. I think it was the quietude, the silence. There is a feeling of being enclosed – here we say, “Everything next to the island is water.” But before I got the idea for the books, I had written one about a woman on an uninhabited island, a Robinson Crusoe story about a woman called Freya, which is the Danish word for Friday. I wasn’t on an island when I came up with the idea, but I was working on an island story – so yes, I have a thing with islands.

CS The rupture in time that Tara experiences is marked by an injury, a searing burn, and its scar serves as a reminder of an existential turning point. Does she still see it like that? 

SB I don’t know. We don’t know whether that event made her jump into November 18, into the repetition. I don’t think so. She dips her hand into a container of cold water after the accident, which is almost like the Archimedean “eureka” moment – however, she has to take a long journey towards understanding, while Archimedes only had to submerge himself for a moment to gain insight into how to calculate volume. I don’t quite know what to make of that injury, but it is, of course, a marker. It is also a marker of the fact that a burn heals – after a while it is just a scar. 

CS Early on in her predicament, Tara acquires a telescope and studies the night sky and even sleeps under the stars. Without chronological time, she becomes newly attached to noticing the finer details of existence. Is she looking into the past – not like an astrologer who consults the stars about the future, but into the deep past?

SB I think it has to do with her feeling about how she affects the world. She finds it rather shocking that she can eat up her world because normally nature replenishes itself. Now, she is in a time without seasons and she cannot grow anything – she is just consuming, and she is affecting her world to the extent that it becomes empty. This feeling that she can look up to the sky and can’t change anything, that it is not up to her to change things, makes her feel a little less like a monster that consumes the world, because underneath the stars she feels so very small. Later on, this doesn’t work for her anymore, because the notion that she is consuming the world has gotten even stronger. Just because we are in a large universe doesn’t mean that we don’t have to take care of our environment. As soon as she eats another vegetable, she cannot deny that she is devouring the world. So she has to go back down to Earth to solve the problems where they are. 

CS While as a reader I feel anxious about her being stuck, she remains proactive and perseveres. Although she is stuck in the same repeating day, she is not stuck geographically, and there is a rare moment when she goes to Paris and goes aimlessly with the flow of the passers-by. She feels kind of lost and for once she “is not trying to keep the upper hand.”

SB She is a fighter trying to keep her bearings, but she must be struggling because she has lost her faith that November 19 will ever come again. I think she’s not different from most of us. We accept much. We tend to live with things that we have no choice but to put up with. In a way, she has had some time to get used to the situation, so maybe it’s not so surprising that she can keep the upper hand most of the time. I don’t think I’d be able to live through it, I would go crazy. But I have a good friend who lost her son when he was 25 years old and people would say to her, “I would die if this happened to me,” and she would tell them, “Yes, but you don’t.” On the one hand, if I were in Tara Selter’s position I would go crazy and on the other hand, I see what terrible things people go through and survive. So maybe it is not that surprising that she keeps her head above water. 

CS Have you ever experienced being unmoored from time, either in a pleasurable or in a painful way? As a young woman, my mother spent several months hovering in a coma, and there she encountered an underworld that she feared for the rest of her life.  

SB I often have the feeling when I go into my glass house or my little shed by the sea that time is almost standing still. It can be wonderful when one is having a very good time. I have a very ambivalent relation to time, and sometimes I worry about it disappearing. I had an uncle who had a stroke, but he lost his short-term memory, and he never understood that I was not 14 years old anymore when I was about 30. And when my aunt mentioned her 60th birthday, he said to her, “You’re not 60!” And she said, “Yes, I am.” But it did not sink in, he could remember everything from before the stroke but nothing after. I didn’t see them very often, but there was this feeling that here was a man who didn’t know time... Sometimes he would say, “I think something strange has happened to me.” Then he was reminded of what had happened, and he would remember for a while, and then he would forget. My aunt and uncle must have gone through something similar to what Tara and Tomas go through. And someone thinking that you are 14 years old forever is very strange, even when he knew exactly who I was. He didn’t know his own story, so to speak, and he would forget it again and again when we told him. But he knew the house very well.

CS I loved your invention of a new timespan, the “centium”. A hundred days seems like a neat package of time. And I like the way you use the decimal system – despair over inches and yards. 

SB When I was first thinking about this book in 1990, I spent almost a year in the United States, mostly in upstate New York, and the feeling of having these two systems, the American weight and time – AM and PM versus the continuous 24-hour clock, and inches versus centimetres – was quite prominent. This imbalance of having two different time zones and measurements was installed in me then, suddenly living with gallons, inches, and Fahrenheit. I never ended up understanding it. I felt like I was living in different systems of time, not just different zones. .