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 Knausgård
Tara Selter’s epic journey through November 18th continues in Book II of the masterly On the Calculation of Volume
The first year of November 18th has come to a close: on its 368th iteration, Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where her time problem began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November 19th.
Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grow heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world has begun whispering to us in a new language.
And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara’s own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact: “It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of 18ths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.” She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, without a purpose or a place. Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp onto durational time through seasonal variations. Book II is all movement and motion—taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages—an amazingly beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued...
We would like to thank the Danish Arts Foundation for their generous support in the translation and publication of books I and II of On the Calculation of Volume.
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 Knausgård
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.
— Hilary Leichter, The New York Times
A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration.
— Nicole Krauss
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.
— Libération
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
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
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
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.
— Cat Zhang, New York Magazine
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.
— Matt Seidel, Asymptote
It is a marvel that these short books contain so much—so many ways of measuring time and its effects, meditations on consumption and destruction, the quantum mechanics of love, the persistence of history and memory, the strange behavior of things in the world, how details appear at molecular and cosmic levels.
— Ania Szremski, 4columns
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.
— K Patrick, The Paris Review
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.
— Marko Gluhaich, Frieze
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.
— John Caleb Grenn, Mississippi Books Page
These books are the talk of the town in New York right now (or at least in my New York).
— Kaitlin Phillips
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.
