On the Calculation of Volume I

Reviews / Votes

'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.' -- Karl Ove Knausgard

'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.' -- Hernan Diaz

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

'I loved it. I found it such a strange and haunting book, given tremendous power by its childlike sense of fable, and the slowly rising sense of true dread; an essential tale in which narrator, and reader, are somehow trapped.' -- Lucy Caldwell

'A masterpiece of its time.' - Nordic Council Literature Prize Jury

'The overarching theme of the fragility of the physical and regular world is intellectually thought-provoking, not least in a climate crisis context. And if you surrender to the language, you get an unusual aesthetic experience that triggers questions about literature itself. This is catalytic literature, which not only touches but also moves one forward, emotionally as well as intellectually.' -- Fedja Wierod Borcak - Boras Tidning (Sweden)

'A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down.' -- Kate Briggs

'A momentous, quietly subversive work: a close up of a married woman confronting the question of how to inhabit her days as the world around her all but stands still. On the Calculation of Volume vibrates with possibility. It's breathtaking, at times heart-stopping - and totally unexpected. A classic in the making.' -- Chetna Maroo

'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.' -- Amy Key

'In On the Calculation of Volume Balle does something unexpected and extraordinary: using repetition and monotony not to create a sense of stability or calm, but instead to steadily move towards an unravelling - of reality, of love, of time itself. It is a mysterious and fascinating read, and by the second half it started to slowly break my heart. I not only want to read the next volume, I think I need to.' -- Jenny Mustard

'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.' - The Cut

'A startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time.' - New Yorker

'If Samuel Beckett had written Groundhog Day, it might read something like On the Calculation of Volume. The first volume unfolds like an existential mystery, a temporal whodunit. . . . Written in intermittent diary-like entries of varying length, On the Calculation of Volume is at once scrupulously realistic and intriguingly speculative. . . . the novel's propulsive imaginative brilliance lies in Tara's metaphoric search for a language with which to communicate the sheer incomprehensibility of her condition.' - Washington Post