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."
