On the Calculation of Volume I

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

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.”

Solvej Balle, born in 1962, made her debut in 1986 with the novel Lyrefugl, and went on to write the highly acclaimed 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”). She has also published a book on aesthetics, a political memoir, and two books of short prose. On the Calculation of Volume heralds the arrival of a major literary artist.

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.