On the Calculation of Volume I

‘On the Calculation of Volume I takes a potentially familiar narrative trope – a protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day – and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist, to want to be alive, to need to share one’s time with others. The sheer quality of the sentences was what struck us most, rendered into English with deft, invisible musicality by the translator. This book presses its mood, its singular time signature and its philosophical depth into the reader. You feel you are in it, which is sometimes unnerving, sometimes soothing, and this effect lingers long after the book is finished.’

Hilary Leichter, The New York Times

‘I braced myself while reading Books I and II of the Danish writer Solvej Balle’s septology, “On the Calculation of Volume,” the story of an antiquarian book dealer who finds herself stuck in a single day. I wondered if repetition, as a form, had anything left to reveal, and then wondered — wait, haven’t I had this thought before? This, too, is a convention of the time-loop plot, the protagonist’s conviction that there’s nothing new to learn, that a moment experienced hundreds of times has been cataloged, conquered and completely understood.’

Jake Casella Brookins, Locus Magazine

‘Balle’s combination of narrator and setup is quietly genius. On the Calculation of Volume is not about comic repetition in the style of Ground­hog Day, more in tune with the uncertainty and uncanniness of something like Russian Doll…Balle has nailed – and Haveland has ably translated – a remarkably believable, organic voice, a kind of quotidian existential mode that is equally suited to evocative descriptions of the world and to percep­tive ruminations on the nature of time, relation­ships, and the self.’

Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic

‘On the Calculation of Volume’s premise could, in other hands, be reduced to a gimmick. But in Haveland’s rendering, Balle’s stripped-down prose has an understated clarity that lends philosophical resonance to this fantastical setup.’

Morten Hoi Jensen, The Washington Post

‘Written in intermittent diary-like entries of varying length, “On the Calculation of Volume” is at once scrupulously realistic and intriguingly speculative. Balle succeeds in conveying the texture of Tara’s changing feelings, her shifting moods. There are moments of crisis and accident interspersed with bursts of enthusiasm and even, at times, hope.’

Publisher’s Weekly

‘Among the stunning qualities of Balle’s brilliant narrative is the way it suspends judgment, simultaneously sustaining the possibility that Tara has gone insane and that she really is caught in a “rift in time.” There are no easy answers in this deeply mysterious tale. Readers won’t be able to look away.’

‘My book is just another time-loop story: A woman, Tara Selter, is trapped in the 18th of November. In a way, I didn’t want to tell this story. I got the idea in 1987 – it probably sprang from some reflections about time after writing my first book, mixed with what I was reading at the time – but the more I thought about it, the more foolish the idea seemed to me, even more so after the Hollywood comedy Groundhog Day came out. I tried to get rid of the idea, but it kept coming back, so in the end I realised that the only way out was to write it. The idea generated so much material that I just wanted to explore it.’ 

Read the full interview here.

‘Solvej Balle’s work is an inspiration in itself. It’s spare and taut. There’s nothing superfluous here, nothing random. Every word is weighed, every phrase and sentence finely honed. The challenge for the translator is to produce a faithful and felicitous rendering in English of her distilled prose. The pleasure lies in working closely with the author to achieve this end – always a happy and fruitful collaboration.’

Read the full interview here.