On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) by Solvej Balle

Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.” 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

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.”

REVIEWS

"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

"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. Her days are compared to a beach, a stream, a puzzle, a construction, a container. "I haven’t found a way out of the eighteenth of November," she laments at the end of the second volume. As readers, we are only beginning to figure out how to navigate this beguiling, haunting novel, wherever it ends up taking us."― Morton Hoi Jensen, The Washington Post

"An unparalleled cliffhanger."― Morgenbladet

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: New Directions
ISBN:  978-0811237253
Pages: 160