On the Calculation of Volume (Book II)
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A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024 The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle's astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language. And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara's own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? "It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea." She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, as something or someone leftover, similar to the little Roman coin she carries around in her pocket, without a purpose or a place. Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion--taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages--a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.
About this 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. Barbara J. Haveland (born 1951) is a Scottish literary translator, resident in Copenhagen. She translates fiction, poetry and drama from Danish and Norwegian to English. She has translated works by many leading Danish and Norwegian writers, both classic and contemporary, including Henrik Ibsen, Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann and Carl Frode Tiller.
Reviews
"A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration."
"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."
"A crazy, philosophical and addictive novel."
"A superb reflection on solitude, individual responsibility, existential fatigue, the fear of those we love leaving us. It is a study of the setbacks, the shifts, the illusions that we weave against the flow of time."
"An ambitious septology... Solvej Balle's completely distinctive phenomenological poetry vibrates even more intensely. Her keen eye for the world's smallest, tiniest details becomes increasingly a form of attentiveness."
"There is little doubt that Solvej Balle is in this volume preparing a masterpiece - her magnum opus itself."
"Existential questions about the core and functioning of human relationships are raised here in a virtuosic and seemingly incidental manner. On the Calculation of Volume is a dazzling, poetic, tremendously multi-layered novel. Temporal anomalies and great literature have never been so successfully combined. Fascinating, extraordinary."
"A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down."
"a hypnotic feat of prose writing, and the first in a septology, Book II (which moves beyond Selter's repeated Nov. 18), is simultaneously published, so you needn't wait for the next translation to see where the series goes next."
""Haveland's translation captures the twitchy urge to both keep moving and seek the comforts of home. A speculative, lyrical study of our sensory self." "
""What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn't? What would we do? Ask Tara Selter. The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle's miraculous septology, who 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 the long-awaited comeback of a now-62-year-old writer." "
""On the Calculation of Volume is a mix of pensive reflection, scientific reasoning, and bone-dry humor, following a mind trying to come to terms with shifting temporal and spatial contours.""
"Supposedly in development for 40 years and still incomplete in its original Danish, this planned seven-part opus is an anguishing look at a rare-books dealer who finds herself reliving the same rainy day in November. New Directions in the US has just published English translations of the first two taut yet rich volumes, whose hypnotic prose propels you through the mundane into the sublime. (A UK edition is forthcoming in April 2025 from Faber.) The novel's protagonist and narrator, Tara Selter, whose business is the inspection of books for their quality and value, uses sensuousness as a phenomenological guide to her quiet, country home, from its sounds and feelings to the trains she takes through Europe. It's superb, and I eagerly await the next volumes."
"Tara Selter, the protagonist of Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume (translated by Barbara J. Haveland), is stuck on the day of November 18, which she repeats endlessly. Trapped in time, she makes an official project of it. Looking becomes ritualistic. The day's relentless sameness is double-checked, until she can predict the movement of birds. Wonderfully, this is the first book in a series of seven."
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