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

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We try to avoid long phone calls when we're apart. Not only because otherwise we would only end up having long, detailed dialogues on the condition of the books, publication years, the illustrations and the pricing but also because such conversations seem to increase the distance between us.The minute we deviate from simple, practical matters, the conversation lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble. Our communication, initially meaningful and coherent, turns into a series of fitful exchanges containing neither sentences nor information: little words and sounds meant—I suppose—to keep the line between us open, but which, instead, make all too clear how far apart we are.

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbably, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us is some small way to face the improbably. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbably, unpredictable, remarkable.

Perhaps I was preparing for another time.

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.

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.

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

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.

On The Calculation of Volume I quotes

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