On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: "That's how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.")
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.
The first volume's gravitational pull--a force inverse to its constriction--has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.
Solvej Balle's seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle's fiction consists of writing that listens. "Reading her is like being caressed by language itself."
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A masterpiece of its time.--jury of the Nordic Council Literary Prize
Solvej Balle writes with relentless consequence, consistency, concise uncanniness, and a singular dry intensity. Original, glistening with beauty.--Erik Skyum-Nielsen "Information"
Solvej Balle uses language as a flashlight and a shovel, alternately illuminating and eroding the foundation of the existence we know as ours.-- "Klassekampen"
An unparalleled cliffhanger.-- "Morgenbladet"
This novel is filled with a tactile, concrete and aptly existence-affirming universe, captured in sparkling sentences.--Vårt Land
A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down.--Kate Briggs
Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time--and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day.--Hernan Diaz
The Danish novelist went into exile on an island for more than twenty years to write On the Calculation of Volume, which has become an international phenomenon.-- "Le Figaro"
A hypnotic feat of prose writing, and the first in a septology... Book II (which moves beyond Selter's repeated Nov. 18), is simultaneously published, so you needn't wait for the next translation to see where the series goes next.--John Vincler "Cultured Mag"
"A sober, thoughtful study of time and connection."-- "Kirkus Reviews"
The richly strange first book of Danish author Balle's seven-part novel is a dreamy, quirky, and indefinitely prolonged version of Groundhog Day.... The philosophical conundrum at the novel's heart is grounded in the ordinariness of everyday, domestic life, and the dilemmas of a marriage in which one partner changes and the other doesn't. A cliffhanger will leave readers anxious to read Book Two.-- "Booklist (starred review)"
"At once a meditation on climate change (because Tara's calendar never turns, neither does the weather) and an experiment with fictional form, Balle's novel is also a startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time."-- "The New Yorker"
