On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

By: Solvej Balle

Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang

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.”

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024

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?

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.”

©2020, 2024 Solvej Balle; Barbara J. Haveland (P)2024 New Directions Publishing Corp.

When time stands still

On the Calculation of Volume 1 is literary Groundhog’s Day. An antique book seller stuck on the same day made me think of the many ways we move through time. A quick study that has left me thinking more than most books.

Engaging story of reliving the day over and over

I liked the whole premise and I liked her writing. I just wanted more of an ending but this is volume 1.

The Perfect Book

It is speculative ficition at its finest, in a way that it takes its own premise very seriously and wanders about within the limitations it has set for itself. Beautifully performed, masterfully written, to day anything about the plot would take away from the experience. It is, arguably, about the incomprehensible experience of existing in the world... localized in space and time as a single day in recursion. The day repeats itself, over and over, yet some things do change, very subtle changes that retain the third law of thermodynamics. Interestingly, and different from all other Groundhog Day scenarios, the protagonists body retains continuity, scars stay and heal and slowly dissapear; thus, the protagonist ages, even though time stands still, and could also die (unlike characters in all other Groundhog Day stories) so there still a temporal pressure, a tension brought forth by this existential finitude in an infinite loop. It is heartfelt, full of yearning and consternation at the predicament of being unstuck in time, and it questions the implications of this strangeness with philosophical candor and a radical self-honesty. It may not, ultimately, provide any answers, but the questions that it asks are all the more important because of it. It is a book best read (or listened to) in a single sitting, for there is a momentum that builds in the search for answers and a way forward in time even if it is a vector with nowhere to go but back, in an endless loop.