Solvej Balle

Barbara Haveland

Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.” 

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)

Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects.  As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)

Long Litt Woon

One woman's journey to overcome grief by delving into nature.. After losing her husband of 32 years, Long Litt Woon is utterly bereft. For a time, she is disoriented, aimless, lost. It is only when she wanders deep into the woods and attunes herself to Nature's chorus that she learns how the wild might restore us to hope, and to life after death.

Overcoming Grief Through Nature

The Way Through the Woods

Peter Høeg

All the stories in Tales of the Night take place on the night of the 19th March 1929. All show different facets of love - love as violence, love as redemption, as suffering, as wisdom. Each has as a theme a particular discipline: mathematics, dance, law, visual arts, medicine, drama and astronomy. A young mathematician is led to an understanding of Europe's 19th century Scramble for Africa by a meeting with a fellow train passenger who reveals himself to be Joseph Conrad. A respected judge confesses his love for a young homosexual who he has convicted of immorality. A small, insular town is ravaged by a smallpox epidemic. Set in the Congo, on a small sailing boat off Lisbon, in the Baltic archipelago and in the author's native Denmark, these intricate and surprising stories, powerfully but wonderfully influenced by the work of Karen Blixen, amount to a rich and rewarding book.

The History of Danish Dreams

Jan Kjærstad

Loosely connected vignettes about troubled Norwegian television director Jonas Wergeland's life reveal large and often unpleasant truths about him, involving a wide swath of women and a murder.

Barbara Haveland

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