On the Calculation of Volume II (Ebook)

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.

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.

A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration.

A masterpiece of its time.

I found On the Calculation of Volume utterly propulsive. ‘There is nothing to do but follow the day’ writes Tara, the narrator, on November 18th #176. I feel I’d follow Tara through this repeated day no matter how many times she experiences it. She stretches a new kind of noticing onto the stable template of the day, so that each takes on unique qualities and textures. The result is a strange, magnetic book which left me questioning my own experiences of stuckness, asking myself what can be gained from finding oneself caught in an everlasting present, and whether I’d have Tara’s hope that I could break free into a new day. I absolutely love this book and am longing for the next volume.

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 whose breakthrough, the 1993 short-story collection According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind, made her an international sensation.