Solvej Balle

Tara Setler has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up on the 18th November, and she no longer remembers the 17th as if it were yesterday…
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

On The Calculation of Volume I

Om udregning af rumfang

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November 18th 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 18th of November.”)

Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her memories of the past light up inside the text like old-fashioned 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 (the thrilling shifts, the minute movements, the slant wit, the 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 I

smile??

These are haunts I have often revisited, alone or with Thomas, but now it is a well-known world in a time that has ground to a halt. I long for a world where time passes. A world where the eighteenth of November is a day like any other, a day you can put behind you.

I have one single rainy day. I harvest nothing. I sow nothing. Nothing is sprouting or growing. My seasons are gone. Nothing comes of my days. They merely pass and I follow them and eat up my world and listen to the ghost in the house.

How do they live in the same houses, though, those couples who have been halved? How do they go on living the same life year after year? In the same rooms, with the same day-to-day routing. how do they do it? Do they go on doing the same things, because the house is the same? Do they retreat into a single room? Do they sit there and suddenly have the idea that they can hear the dead walking about? Are the dead too close or too far away? Do they hear steps in the distance or a hand or sleeve brushing the wallpaper? Do they think they are ghosts in the house? Do they think they are monsters when the other half has stopped eating?

There are ghosts and monsters. Thomas is the ghost and I am the monster.

It is the loss that staggers me. It is the longing for what is lost and there is nothing I can do about it.

Maybe my sentences are no more than repeated calls to an emergency hot line where no one answers the phone. Little attempts to leave a message for someone who never calls back.

Maybe the days will rise to the surface like bubble and all at once it will be May or June and I will wake to morning light and be blown away by the singing of the birds. Or I will wake up in August, to a late summer morning and everything will sound different. I will wake to Thomas on the stairs. To stairs that creak the way old stairs creak when it has been summer for long enough.

He won't come in here. He won't come in and find his 151 forgotten days. He draws near, but he passes the door. I am safe. From the days that pile up between us. From Thomas and all his forgetting.

The distance is greatest when he is in the living room and I sometimes have the urge to transcend the distance, I feel like getting up and opening the door and ruining everything, disrupting our rhythm. But I know that if I went in there the distance between us would grow even greater and I don't go. I do not go in and toss 151 days onto the floor in a heap between us. I don't go into that room and try to drag him out of his pattern. I live with the distance. I sit on the bed and read. I know t hat he will soon come closer again. Why would I toss 151 days onto the floor in a head when I can have this very short distance?

I am not saying I have lost hope, I am simply saying that it seldom comes to call. I cannot sit down and wait, safe in the knowledge that it will turn up, I cannot summon it to me, but sometimes, nonetheless, hope comes back.

I am not saying I have lost hope. It just doesn't come by so often any more. It has moved away. It was quite undramatic, it did not slam the door behind it, it is more as if, like an animal, it has found new hunting grounds, like a cat that has moved next door or a plant that has scattered its seeds where they are more likely to grow.

Now the fun was over and all that remained were the pointless investigations that filled our day: our vain attempts to fathom the mystery of time; the countless questions we had to give up answering, again and again, and usually—often around the point when we were in the kitchen, making dinner—we gave up on our explanations and turned to the question of what was to become of us. Would we be able to stick together? would I be able to face Thomas each morning and tell him about more and more days, fresh explanations, collapsing houses of cards, dead ends and narrow passages?

Thomas was caught in eternity and I was slowly but surely moving toward my grave.

We talked about cameras which could record changes. We talked about love. About whether it could make things happen. About whether love could bring us in or out.

Perhaps I was preparing for another time.

Thomas, lying next to me, was no longer my sleeping husband on some indeterminate morning, but my husband moving away, day by day, my not yet lost love, whose look of surprise I was about to meet, because this was no ordinary morning and I was no longer Tara, half-asleep, nebulously alive and quietly happy, but Tara back in a broken time and yet again I had to explain to Thomas what had happened.

this development of their relationship is EVERYTHING to me and brings depth and heartache to what was a very simple premise for this book. it's not just that tara is living the same day, it's that she's still moving forward in time and thomas isn't. mentally, emotionally, physically, she's cut off from the rhythm of his world. it's repeated very frequently as her sanity goes on a roller coaster: after a while, he becomes a stranger to her. even with the first sentence of the book ("There is someone in the house.") you're told just how disconnected she is from him as the days add up

The number of days was no longer something we talked about. We couldn't let the days come between us: I kept the distance shut away in a drawer in the kitchen.

Now, I remember those as the happiest days. Ever. I felt loved. I felt loved on the sofa in the living room and on the floor. I felt loved in bed and when we sat at the dining table in the evening. There was nothing unusual in this. It was no different from before the eighteenth of November, only stronger, and there was nothing we had to do. This was a time that did not run away with us. It was like the time after we first met, only more intense and possible—or so it seems to me now—with an undertone of quiet desperation, but that is not how we saw it. there was the feel of electrically charged skin, the way our sentences flowed together when we talked. There was something in the air between us, an intensity, a dense network of connections. I felt understood. I uttered sentences that were hear and heard the words that were spoken.

We were living in two different times. That was all. Two times that had flooded their banks.

Those were strange days. We woke in the morning, we went for walks, we sat down and had coffee somewhere on the eighteenth of November. For most of the day as intimately aware of one another as couples in the first flush of love or nearsighted creatures. We made the horizon vanish. We sought this giddy feeling. The distance between us was dispelled in the fog. We made the giddiness a part of our day. Created a bright space out of dazed, gray confusion.

I don't know what is going on. Whether time is switched off at night, whether past and future disappear during slumber and are not invoked again until one wakes. Or whether it is the words that are erased, leaving only the outlines of things. Maybe it is language that shuts down, so one wakes up wordless or with words only for the most immediate concepts: morning, now, here, awake, light. Maybe one wakes without sentences. or with the simplest sentences, which unfold as one wakes up. Now it is morning. Here is a day. I am awake.

Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it's a chemical reaction, I don't know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other's company, Maybe we are a weather system—condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters. Or a weather system which, until the eighteenth of November, saw no disasters.

We made love on the living-room floor. We have always had need of time together. We are not one of those couples that has to have time apart, to miss and rediscover one another, to go away then be reunited in a collision of love. Distance, leave-talking and reunions are not what bind us to one another, For us it has always been about the days together, day after day, night after night, again and again. There is a tension that grows between us, a force field that intensifies as the day goes on until often, after a long day together, we will suddenly start to undress one another.

I am no longer sure what I saw there in the dark, but what I remember now is a fleeting glance which I can only describe as faintly reproachful, as if it was not time, but me, that was failing him and throwing his world out of kilter.

- when someone asks what my reading taste is i’m just going to point aggressively at this book cover as i foam at the mouth. this is everything i could ever ask for out of a speculative fiction story

- says lots on distance in a marriage, and so much of this novel i ran with as a metaphor for mundane days, a life gone numb and time passing differently between two lovers

- the science fiction and theorizing of this novel i loved as well (this is a sentence i never say). once i reached the second or third day, i stopped but the story didn’t leave me. it’s been years since any book has infected my brain the way this one did; i inhaled the whole thing in about 8 hours and loved every page

- nothing but good things to say about this, and it’s an easy recommendation for anyone. the writing is easy to pick up, you eat through the chapters like fast food, there’s worldbuilding to dig into while still being immensely character-driven. it’s perfect

- when someone asks what my reading taste is i’m just going to point aggressively at this book cover as i foam at the mouth. this is everything i could ever ask for out of a speculative fiction story

- says lots on distance in a marriage, and so much of this novel i ran with as a metaphor for mundane days, a life gone numb and time passing differently between two lovers

- the science fiction and theorizing of this novel i loved as well (this is a sentence i never say). once i reached the second or third day, i stopped but the story didn’t leave me. it’s been years since any book has infected my brain the way this one did; i inhaled the whole thing in about 8 hours and loved every page

- nothing but good things to say about this, and it’s an easy recommendation for anyone. the writing is easy to pick up, you eat through the chapters like fast food, there’s worldbuilding to dig into while still being immensely character-driven. it’s perfect

Nothing but respect for managing to tackle this specificity, in this style, and keeping it a relative page-turner. 

SIX more though? Not quite my tempo. Made me realise how much I need dialogue.

Favourite part was the couple of pages that compare what's happening to losing someone you've lived with a long time and still feeling their presence.

c0up

Nothing but respect for managing to tackle this specificity, in this style, and keeping it a relative page-turner. 

SIX more though? Not quite my tempo. Made me realise how much I need dialogue.

Favourite part was the couple of pages that compare what's happening to losing someone you've lived with a long time and still feeling their presence.

a bit of a slow start but got sooo sucked in. so beautiful and so mundane. maybe beautiful because of the mundane 

petrina

What does it mean to love, to belong, to remain human, when your days are no longer in step with anyone else’s?

Aksara

I spotted a plot hole that really bothers me on my experience while reading, though I found the proses relatable. It was promising at first, really, I had a big expectations but I realized it’s getting nowhere. I get the allegory of time and repetitive days, I just don’t see something that makes me really like it. 

Lilianne

Highly rated series but i dont see myself getting into it :( 

Rabia Sohail

it took me so long to read thisss

Highly rated series but i dont see myself getting into it :( 

The novel felt like mostly vibes of the quiotidian but that is also what makes it so interesting. Balle has managed to write about a time loop without making it feel repetitive or boring. Rather, it is strangely believable and relatable. From the giving up on repeating the same story again and again, to trying to figure out a way out, to depressive episodes - who among us would have not behaved in the same way? And more importantly, who among us does not find themselves going through the same emotions as they fall into the routine of their daily lives?

On the Calculation of Volume is a seven-book series written by Danish author Solvej Balle, 5 of which have been released in Denmark and 2 of which have been currently translated to English and are available to buy at the time of writing this. I feel like this is important information to preface because it is a relatively short novel, clocking in at around 180 pages, and with the novel’s strange, experimental, offbeat nature, it’s important to understand that it is part of a larger body of work in which the sum may be more than the whole of its parts. Saying that, however, I have only read this book in front of me, Book 1 of 7, and, while I definitely will read later books in the series at some point, I can only judge a book for what is in the book, and not for potential books I have yet to read. It may be the case that I retroactively change my opinion on this in the future knowing how it all fits in.

… is a time loop story. On the 18th of November in some year, our protagonist and narrator Tara goes about her day as an antique bookseller, focussing on procuring some rare books in Paris. A completely normal day ensues. However, when she wakes up the next morning in her hotel room, she finds everything from her memory of that previous morning being replayed—though some of the books she procured remain in her possession, alongside a burn mark she suffered from the previous night. She goes to sleep and wakes up to the same phenomenon: everything in the world is reset to the morning of the 18th of November, save for her, her memories, and her possessions. Hundreds of days have passed like this already—we see her story reflected in the journal she has kept since the loop began—and there seems to be no way out.

It is somewhat of a classic science fiction trope, but the book carefully stays away from the trappings of conventionality. What Balle is more interested in is the philosophical questions the time loop frame can offer, and what Tara’s unique position in the world can tell us about the way we think about life, belonging, and companionship. My favourite part of the novel is Tara’s interactions with her husband, Thomas. Tara’s first solution to get out of the scenario she’s in is to explain everything to Thomas, who trusts her inherently and strives as much as he can to find explanations and solutions, scientific or otherwise. The kicker is, of course, that every night at an unspecified time the world resets to the 18th of November, and Thomas’s memories, unlike Tara’s, do not carry forward. In Thomas’s mind, Tara should be in Paris—her presence in their house necessitates an explanation, which Tara continues to deliver, morning after morning,  alongside the accumulation of knowledge she has gained after dozens of 18ths of Novembers.

Sooner or later Tara realises that this obligation to explain becomes a burden, and so she stops seeking him out, choosing to live her 18ths in a guest room in the house. In doing this, her love shifts from companionship and presence to observation and devotion, with her memorising his daily habits and shiftings around the house, knowing them better than she knows herself. In doing so, she saves him from the distress of an explanation, and allows him to live his undisturbed November day continuously. It's a beautiful encapsulation of enduring love, even in moments of unexplainable existential collapse.

Balle’s style is straightforward and uncomplicated, focussed on the everyday and the mundane. Fans of Karl Ove Knausgaard would appreciate the level of granular detail dedicated to the small things, such as household chores and everyday occurrences. And despite its sci-fi adjacent premise, the suburban, middle-class setting does not stray wildly into discussions of parallel universes or into philosophical understandings of Tara’s scenario, for why would they? Tara is a mere bookseller, not a philosophically trained author, who has just found herself in this dreaded existential purgatory, and the narration reflects this almost devastating acquiescence. 

The style both lent impact to the major themes of the book and somewhat detracted from my reading experience at the same time. For the former, the book is principally concerned with ‘possessions’ and ‘attention.’ What would we actually see in our life, if we bothered to look? If the day was repeated, what would we notice? If we don’t notice, is it the same as nonexistence? It is established clearly that what Tara brings ‘beyond the precipice’ into the next ‘day’ are things she has actively thought about and considered as her own, no matter the size. And this focus on objects serves an ecological message too—what do we ‘devour’, as humans, if we pay attention to everything we consume; if, when a day is repeated, we never get back what we used up? The writing style, focussing on small things and small actions, lends itself nicely to this central message.

For the latter, though, with the novel being 1/5th of the size of a typical Knausgaard book, you’ll quickly find out that the novel is practically over before it begins, and a lot of its space is spent on these small details. Perhaps that is intentional by Balle. Perhaps, like the story’s premise, we should re-read and drill down on the small details as much as possible. But I do wonder whether it would be better to combine some of these smaller books in a 7-book series into one longer work.

In all, though, I definitely enjoyed the book’s unique (at least for literary fiction) premise, alongside its offbeat style. At points, Tara’s desperation and existential dread is presented masterfully by Balle. I definitely want to read more in this series as it comes out, but I might wait a bit until everything is available in English.

shain

On the Calculation of Volume is a seven-book series written by Danish author Solvej Balle, 5 of which have been released in Denmark and 2 of which have been currently translated to English and are available to buy at the time of writing this. I feel like this is important information to preface because it is a relatively short novel, clocking in at around 180 pages, and with the novel’s strange, experimental, offbeat nature, it’s important to understand that it is part of a larger body of work in which the sum may be more than the whole of its parts. Saying that, however, I have only read this book in front of me, Book 1 of 7, and, while I definitely will read later books in the series at some point, I can only judge a book for what is in the book, and not for potential books I have yet to read. It may be the case that I retroactively change my opinion on this in the future knowing how it all fits in.

On the Calculation… is a time loop story. On the 18th of November in some year, our protagonist and narrator Tara goes about her day as an antique bookseller, focussing on procuring some rare books in Paris. A completely normal day ensues. However, when she wakes up the next morning in her hotel room, she finds everything from her memory of that previous morning being replayed—though some of the books she procured remain in her possession, alongside a burn mark she suffered from the previous night. She goes to sleep and wakes up to the same phenomenon: everything in the world is reset to the morning of the 18th of November, save for her, her memories, and her possessions. Hundreds of days have passed like this already—we see her story reflected in the journal she has kept since the loop began—and there seems to be no way out.

It is somewhat of a classic science fiction trope, but the book carefully stays away from the trappings of conventionality. What Balle is more interested in is the philosophical questions the time loop frame can offer, and what Tara’s unique position in the world can tell us about the way we think about life, belonging, and companionship. My favourite part of the novel is Tara’s interactions with her husband, Thomas. Tara’s first solution to get out of the scenario she’s in is to explain everything to Thomas, who trusts her inherently and strives as much as he can to find explanations and solutions, scientific or otherwise. The kicker is, of course, that every night at an unspecified time the world resets to the 18th of November, and Thomas’s memories, unlike Tara’s, do not carry forward. In Thomas’s mind, Tara should be in Paris—her presence in their house necessitates an explanation, which Tara continues to deliver, morning after morning,  alongside the accumulation of knowledge she has gained after dozens of 18ths of Novembers.

Sooner or later Tara realises that this obligation to explain becomes a burden, and so she stops seeking him out, choosing to live her 18ths in a guest room in the house. In doing this, her love shifts from companionship and presence to observation and devotion, with her memorising his daily habits and shiftings around the house, knowing them better than she knows herself. In doing so, she saves him from the distress of an explanation, and allows him to live his undisturbed November day continuously. It's a beautiful encapsulation of enduring love, even in moments of unexplainable existential collapse.

Balle’s style is straightforward and uncomplicated, focussed on the everyday and the mundane. Fans of Karl Ove Knausgaard would appreciate the level of granular detail dedicated to the small things, such as household chores and everyday occurrences. And despite its sci-fi adjacent premise, the suburban, middle-class setting does not stray wildly into discussions of parallel universes or into philosophical understandings of Tara’s scenario, for why would they? Tara is a mere bookseller, not a philosophically trained author, who has just found herself in this dreaded existential purgatory, and the narration reflects this almost devastating acquiescence. 

The style both lent impact to the major themes of the book and somewhat detracted from my reading experience at the same time. For the former, the book is principally concerned with ‘possessions’ and ‘attention.’ What would we actually see in our life, if we bothered to look? If the day was repeated, what would we notice? If we don’t notice, is it the same as nonexistence? It is established clearly that what Tara brings ‘beyond the precipice’ into the next ‘day’ are things she has actively thought about and considered as her own, no matter the size. And this focus on objects serves an ecological message too—what do we ‘devour’, as humans, if we pay attention to everything we consume; if, when a day is repeated, we never get back what we used up? The writing style, focussing on small things and small actions, lends itself nicely to this central message.

For the latter, though, with the novel being 1/5th of the size of a typical Knausgaard book, you’ll quickly find out that the novel is practically over before it begins, and a lot of its space is spent on these small details. Perhaps that is intentional by Balle. Perhaps, like the story’s premise, we should re-read and drill down on the small details as much as possible. But I do wonder whether it would be better to combine some of these smaller books in a 7-book series into one longer work.

In all, though, I definitely enjoyed the book’s unique (at least for literary fiction) premise, alongside its offbeat style. At points, Tara’s desperation and existential dread is presented masterfully by Balle. I definitely want to read more in this series as it comes out, but I might wait a bit until everything is available in English.

On The Calculation of Volume I

Reviews

Highlights