On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)

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On the Calculation of Volume
(Book I)

by
Solvej Balle

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)
Author:	Solvej Balle
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2020 (Eng. 2024)
Length:	147 pages
Original in:	Danish
Availability:	On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) - US
	On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) - UK
	On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) - Canada
	Le volume du temps - 1 - France
	Über die Berechnung des Rauminhalts I - Deutschland
	Il volume del tempo I: L'enigma - Italia
	El volumen del tiempo I - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Danish title: Om udregning af rumfang I
Translated by Barbara J. Haveland
The first book of a septology
Nordic Council Literature Prize, 2022

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Our Assessment:

A- : impressive handling of an interesting premise

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Frankfurter Rundschau	.	1/2/2023	Petra Pluwatsch
NZZ	.	28/8/2024	Jan Koneffke

From the Reviews:

"Solvej Balle gibt in ihrem außergewöhnlichen Roman keine Antworten. So bleibt es den Leserinnen und Lesern überlassen, herauszufinden, was geschehen sein mag an diesem 18. November, der die Welt der Tara Selter zum Stillstand brachte. Das ist ausgesprochen spannend und mag zu Fehlinterpretationen führen." - Petra Pluwatsch, Frankfurter Rundschau

"Das Spektakuläre an den Romanen von Solvej Balle ist ihre stille, auf das Wesentliche reduzierte Erzählweise. Vorrang hat die Reflexion des Geschehens." - Jan Koneffke, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is a year-in-the-life novel, Tara Selter chronicling 366 days of her life. The novel is presented as a loosely kept sort of diary, Tara writing down what is happening -- and what is not happening ... --, beginning only on day 121 of her strange year, but relating in these pages also what happened in the 120 before then. She hopes: "there may be healing in sentences" -- and she is certainly in need of both hope and healing, as she has found herself waking each day yet again on the 18th of November, with no one but her having any memory of the previous (i.e. same) day. As she puts it: "time has fallen apart". Whereas everyone around her lives still in the same familiar continuum, she is stuck in a time-loop, condemned to live through the 18th of November over and over and over.
       It's more or less the scenario familiar from the classic 1993 movie, Groundhog Day -- though Tara's day isn't exactly an identical do-over. There are "inconsistencies in time", beyond the carry-over of memory Tara has. She can take some physical objects with her, as it were, and, notably: "the paper remembers", allowing her to document her experience. Physical change also carries over -- a burn she suffers slowly heals, as if time were passing normally, for example, and she does not wake each morning in the same bed and place, for example, but rather wherever she has gone to sleep; the rupture she experience is only in the time- and not the space-continuum
       Beginning her look back some four months into her experience, she describes her attempts to deal with her situation. Tara is married to Thomas, and they live in northern France, in (fictional) Clairon-sous-Bois; they run a business from home, T. & T. Selter, dealing: "in antiquarian books, specializing in illustrated works from the eighteenth century". Tara had traveled, via Paris, to Bordeaux on the 17th, to attend an auction, and in the evening she returned to Paris, where she planned to spend two days; she has an appointment scheduled for the 19th at a research library there. Of course, things never get to that point, for her.
       Finding herself in this time-loop, Tara soon turns to Thomas -- returning to Clairon-sous-Bois, rather than re-living the day in Paris. She explains to him what she is going through and he believes her, and they try to figure out what might be going on -- starting over each day, of course, because for him each morning brings the original 18th November, with no memory of the previous one(s) Tara has lived through. By the time she starts her account, however, 121 eighteenth of Novembers in, she has decided to go it alone, finding: "We could not share the eighteenth of November. That was a day I had to carry alone". She has moved into the guest room in their house, hiding her presence so that Thomas won't know she is there. Knowing what he will do each day -- because it is the same day, and he always does the same things, at the same time -- she easily manages to conceal her presence, with Thomas of course believing she is actually in Paris -- as she initially was.
       Balle presents this unreal situation, and Tara's attempts to come to grips with it, well. As absurd as the premise is, Tara's descriptions of what she is going through and her attempts to figure out the extent of her control over it, as well as how she might escape this loop ring plausible. The fact that it is not a pure loop -- that she does not return to the same physical starting point each day, and that she recognizes: "There were inconsistencies in time and it was impossible to discern a pattern that made sense" -- makes the whole even eerier.
       The repetition makes for a narrative that is, effectively, both numbing and suspenseful. Tara's account is not day-by-day; the entries are numbered -- by how many days have passed -- and she often skips several or many at a time, making this story that is anchored so firmly in sameness even more (and surprisingly) taut.
       The sameness of our days in everyday life is, of course, part of the human condition; here it is taken to extremes. Yet Tara still has considerable free will: she is stuck in one kind of rut, and yet can shape her day and do what she wants; one of the surprises here is that she doesn't take more extreme action. Instead, her focus is very much -- practically entirely -- on escaping the loop:

I long for a world where time passes. A world where the eighteenth of November is a day like any other, a day you can put behind you.

       As her first year of November-eighteenths comes to a close, she writes that: "it feels as though there is a hole in my eighteenth of November. As though there is a way out, but it is no longer one of the ways out that I had imagined".
       On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is successful as is, a complete, or at least complete enough, novel -- but, of course, the reader is all too well aware that this is not the end of the story, that there is more to come. A great deal more, in fact: book one is the first in a seven-volume set, so really, this can't be much more than the beginning ..... (Intriguingly, too, at the time of the English-language publication, at the end of 2024, of the first two volumes, even the Danish original is only up to volume five .....)
       Balle's achievement here impresses -- but leaves the nagging worry/hope as to where the story might go from here. She shows the great potential of her premise, but this book one covers only 147 pages; can she keep it up over six more volumes -- or will Tara bog down completely in her repetitive loop ?
       Still: so far, so good -- very good, indeed. And we'll see where the day takes her .....

- M.A.Orthofer, 26 October 2024

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Links:

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I):

New Directions publicity page
Grasset publicity page
Matthes & Seitz Berlin publicity page
NNEditore publicity page
Anagrama publicity page
Nordic Council Literature Prize, 2022
Q & A with Solvej Balle and translator Barbara J. Haveland at Words Without Borders

Reviews:

Other books by Solvej Balle under review:

On the Calculation of Volume (Book II)

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Scandinavian literature
See Index of Series and Sequels under review
Index of Nordic Council Literature Prize-winning works under review

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About the Author:

Danish author Solvej Balle was born in 1962.

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