In Balle’s five-book opus (of a planned septology), the first three of which won the prestigious Nordic Council literature prize in 2022, someone wakes up to find they are reliving the same day over and over. Their partner, family, neighbours: they all experience this day for the first time in their life. Only the protagonist has been there before. That person is a woman called Tara rather than a man called Phil, and the day is 18 November rather than 2 February, but the plot resemblance to Groundhog Day is striking.
The only thing is: Balle got there first. When Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell and the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil hit the big screen in 1993, the kernel of Balle’s story had already been stewing in her brain for six years. An obsession in her 20s with James Joyce’s Ulysses – set entirely on 16 June 1904 – had led her to wonder how much a single day could contain: “The thing that fascinated me most was the question: how can one day be so voluminous?”
When I was young, I thought I’d stop having nightmares. I imagined growing up was supposed to be about leaving childhood fears behind. But now that I’m older, I know that it doesn’t work that way. I’m still scared; it’s just the things that terrify me have changed. My greatest fears no longer happen at night, when my eyes are closed. Instead, they happen in the light of day. When I am awake.
Maybe I’m Amazed opens with John Harris’s 15-year-old son, James, ecstatically absorbed in a live performance by Paul McCartney, “so held in the moment that he is almost in an altered state”. Harris then loops back to before James’s birth, and tells the story of his son’s arrival, his preschool diagnosis of autism, and how his differences manifest as he grows up. James loves music – the Beatles chief among a rich buffet of bands and tracks he listens to, over and over – and so Harris divides the book into 10 chapters named after songs, each with a particular resonance.