Endlessly fascinating, supple, and tenderly human, Balle’s masterpiece reaches new heights.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A literary phenomenon nearly forty years in the making, and a speculative masterwork” (New York Magazine), Book III introduces new thrills to the adventures of Tara Selter’s endless November day
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
In the marvelous third installment of Balle’s “astonishing” (The Washington Post) septology, Tara’s November 18th transforms when she discovers that she is no longer alone in her endless autumnal day. For she has met someone who remembers, and who knows as well as she does that “it is autumn, but that we’re not heading into winter. That spring and summer will not follow. That the reds and yellows of the trees are here to stay.” Where Book I and II focused on a single woman’s involuntary journey away from her life and her loved ones and into the chasm of time, Book III brings us back into the realm of companionship, with all its thrills, odd quirks, and a sense of mutual bewilderment at having to relearn how to exist alongside others in a shared reality. And then of course, what of Tara’s husband Thomas, still sitting alone day after day, entirely unawares, in their house in Clarion-sous-Bois, waiting for his wife to return? Blending poetry and philosophical inquiry with rich reflections on our discombobulating times, Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume asks us to consider: What is a single person’s responsibility to humanity and to the preservation of this world?
Endlessly fascinating, supple, and tenderly human, Balle’s masterpiece reaches new heights.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Balle’s novel is a startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time.
— The New Yorker
The novel’s propulsive imaginative brilliance lies in Tara’s metaphoric search for a language with which to communicate the sheer incomprehensibility of her condition. Her days are compared to a beach, a stream, a puzzle, a construction, a container. "I haven’t found a way out of the eighteenth of November," she laments at the end of the second volume. As readers, we are only beginning to figure out how to navigate this beguiling, haunting novel, wherever it ends up taking us.
— Morten Hoi Jensen, The Washington Post
Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time—and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day.
— Hernan Diaz
In Solvej Balle’s new series, the concept of a time loop is more than a gimmick; it’s a way of rethinking human existence.
— Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic
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.
— The Maris Review
For the reader the series’ seductive qualities are only deepening. A brainy and beguiling meditation on time and purpose.
