About the Book
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE 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.”
About the Author :
Solvej Balle was born in 1962, made her debut in 1986 with Lyrefugl, and she went on to write one of the 1990s’ most acclaimed works of Danish literature, According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind (praised by Publishers Weekly for its blend of “sly humor, bleak vision, and terrified sense of the absurd with a tacit intuition that the world has a meaning not yet fathomed”). Since then, she’s published a book on art theory, Det umuliges kunst, 2005, a political memoir Frydendal og andre gidsler, 2008, and two books of short prose Hvis and Så, published simultaneously in 2013. On the Calculation of Volume is Solvej Balle’s major comeback, not just to Danish or Nordic fiction, but—expanding the possibilities of the novel—to all of world literature. Barbara J. Haveland (born 1951) is a Scottish literary translator, resident in Copenhagen. She translates fiction, poetry and drama from Danish and Norwegian to English. She has translated works by many leading Danish and Norwegian writers, both classic and contemporary, including Henrik Ibsen, Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann and Carl Frode Tiller.
Review :
"A masterpiece of its time."
"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."
"Balle’s thrilling seven-volume meditation on time, in a translation from Barbara J. Haveland, nods at speculative protocols and then politely abandons them on the banks of an endless Nov. 18. A quiet meditation on marriage observed from both a terribly near and far distance. “Time has come between us,” Tara writes, a sentence that could easily speak to the gradual drift in any relationship. Balle communicates something painful about the limits of sharing a life, and perhaps the limits of sharing time at all."
"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."
"Tara Selter, the protagonist of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (translated by Barbara J. Haveland), is stuck on the day of November 18, which she repeats endlessly. Trapped in time, she makes an official project of it. Looking becomes ritualistic. The day’s relentless sameness is double-checked, until she can predict the movement of birds. Wonderfully, this is the first book in a series of seven."
""What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn’t? What would we do? Ask Tara Selter. The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle’s miraculous septology, who has been trapped in the same day with no end in sight. On the Calculation of Volume is a literary phenomenon nearly 40 years in the making. It’s a speculative masterwork and the long-awaited comeback of a now-62-year-old writer.""
"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."
"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."
"On the Calculation of Volume I takes a potentially familiar narrative trope—a protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day—and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist, to want to be alive, to need to share one’s time with others. The sheer quality of the sentences was what struck us most, rendered into English with deft, invisible musicality by the translator. This book presses its mood, its singular time signature and its philosophical depth into the reader. You feel you are in it, which is sometimes unnerving, sometimes soothing, and this effect lingers long after the book is finished."
"An unparalleled cliffhanger."
"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."
"Solvej Balle writes with relentless consequence, consistency, concise uncanniness, and a singular dry intensity. Original, glistening with beauty."
"Solvej Balle uses language as a flashlight and a shovel, alternately illuminating and eroding the foundation of the existence we know as ours."
"This novel is filled with a tactile, concrete and aptly existence-affirming universe, captured in sparkling sentences."
"A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down."
"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."
""A sober, thoughtful study of time and connection." "
""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.""
""On the Calculation of Volume is a mix of pensive reflection, scientific reasoning, and bone-dry humor, following a mind trying to come to terms with shifting temporal and spatial contours.""
"Supposedly in development for 40 years and still incomplete in its original Danish, this planned seven-part opus is an anguishing look at a rare-books dealer who finds herself reliving the same rainy day in November. New Directions in the US has just published English translations of the first two taut yet rich volumes, whose hypnotic prose propels you through the mundane into the sublime. (A UK edition is forthcoming in April 2025 from Faber.) The novel’s protagonist and narrator, Tara Selter, whose business is the inspection of books for their quality and value, uses sensuousness as a phenomenological guide to her quiet, country home, from its sounds and feelings to the trains she takes through Europe. It’s superb, and I eagerly await the next volumes."
""This novel is dreamy and dissociative; it’s careful and disquieting. More than all of that, however, it is brilliant in its exploration of connection and time.""
"These books are the talk of the town in New York right now (or at least in my New York)."
"Balle’s canny rendering of such an unfathomable (yet also not too far off from normal lived experience) existence with such fidelity and precision while maintaining a strict emotional reserve...may well remain as remote yet tantalizingly inaccessible as the meaning of life as we live it, day by day by day."
"On the Calculation of Volume is a thrilling example of what an author can do with narrative when time doesn't work in a traditional way. It's a tragic story with so many moments of hope."
"Balle is an expert fly-fisher, angling for our attention before tossing out the lure of a new clue to hook our inner detectives. The effect is tantalizing"
