On The Calculation Of Volume (Book I)

Description

Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in Translation

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 total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration." -- Nicole Krauss
"What the best novels can do is open up spaces. And she has opened a space in time, and it is absolutely, absolutely incredible. I think it's a fantastic book." -- Karl Ove Knausgard
"A crazy, philosophical and addictive novel." -- Les Inrockuptibles
"A superb reflection on solitude, individual responsibility, existential fatigue, the fear of those we love leaving us. It is a study of the setbacks, the shifts, the illusions that we weave against the flow of time." -- Liberation
"An ambitious septology... Solvej Balle's completely distinctive phenomenological poetry vibrates even more intensely. Her keen eye for the world's smallest, tiniest details becomes increasingly a form of attentiveness." -- Weekendavisen
"There is little doubt that Solvej Balle is in this volume preparing a masterpiece - her magnum opus itself." -- Stavanger Aftenblad
"Existential questions about the core and functioning of human relationships are raised here in a virtuosic and seemingly incidental manner. On the Calculation of Volume is a dazzling, poetic, tremendously multi-layered novel. Temporal anomalies and great literature have never been so successfully combined. Fascinating, extraordinary." -- Horazio (Germany)
"A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down." -- Kate Briggs
"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
""Haveland's translation captures the twitchy urge to both keep moving and seek the comforts of home. A speculative, lyrical study of our sensory self." " -- Kirkus Reviews
""Miraculous"
" -- New York Magazine

Author Biography: 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 Sa, 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 Hoeg, Linn Ullmann and Carl Frode Tiller.