The fourth installment of Balle’s expansive, and highly ambitious On the Calculation of Volumeteems with new faces, new people, and voices from every corner of the western world
We’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle’s riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world―fellow travelers within November 18th―and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself–must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara’s notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one―not even Tara, our steady cataloger and cartographer of the endless November day―could have foreseen.
"The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle’s miraculous septology 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 long-awaited comeback of a now-62-year-old writer.”"
― Cat Zhang, New York Magazine
"“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”"
― Morten Høi Jensen, The Washington Post
"“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 Knausgaard
"“If time has ceased flowing for Tara, for the reader its flow is exhilarating, propelling us through the slender pages of these two compact volumes, each of which ends on a tantalizing cliff-hanger, inciting our desire for more (that the third and fourth installments will not be available in English until November 2025 is, for me, a terrible cruelty!).”"
― Ania Szremski, 4Columns
"“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
"“A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down.” "
― Kate Briggs
"“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
"A speculative novel that, with each new volume, feels ever more intensely about the present. A lively entry in a provocative series, thick with questions about morals and ethics."
― Kirkus Reviews (Starred)
"This fourth volume (of seven) is a meditation on time that takes place on an endless Nov. 18, giving the time-loop narrative new and stunning proportions."
― The New York Times
"Remarkable... This will leave readers counting down the days to the next installment."
― Publishers Weekly
"A symphony of voices, kind, curious, various, energetic and possibly healing... Balle's serial novel takes the idea of repetition and uses it to make ancient, impossible problems of time new again. What is astonishing about her novel is the way she makes us see that we have constructed our world so we don't have to think about time's scalding realities."
― Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books
"Balle's novel is philosophical in a robust sense. Its range is ambitious, encompassing all three of the questions that, according to Kant, comprise philosophy's fundamental concerns: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?"
― Clare Carlisle, The Yale Review
"On the Calculation of Volume is a practicum in novelty, but whatever philosophical positions underpin Balle’s world, I suspect they won’t be so easily reducible to one program or another, and that the form of the novel itself is her answer to these deepest and strangest of our questions, her chosen method of doing philosophy."
― Jack Rockwell, Words Without Borders
"The novel is a brilliant meditation on the collective, on the delights and tedium of living closely with others, on the necessity of some form of organization and the worthwhile frustrations that often ensue... It’s a testament to Balle’s writing, and to the work of her excellent translators, that a fourth novel set in the same day, in the same mind, has not grown even a bit tired."
― Bekah Waalkes, Financial Times
"Balle is our century's answer to Proust."
― A.O. Scott, The New York Times
"Volume IV marks a new situation, with new dynamics and issues, and moves the story along well. Balle plants the seed of yet more change to follow, with a 'cliffhanger' ending, as Tara's situation looks to be shaken up unexpectedly again."
― Michael Orthofer, Complete Review
"Intoxicating... In On the Calculation of Volume, Balle distills fleeting experiences into an engrossing literary epic, creating space in November 18 to give the atmosphere of every day its due."
― Joshua Kazali, Public Books
About the Author
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 Så, 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.
Sophia Hersi Smith is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Jennifer Russell, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Marianne Larsen, and Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild.
Jennifer Russell is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Sophia Hersi Smith, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Marianne Larsen, and Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild.
