Book Review: On the Calculation of Volume

Summary

Book Review: On the Calculation of Volume Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume is a planned septology about a Danish antiquarian book dealer who falls out of time, and the first five volumes are one of the most original and brilliant literary projects I've read in years. The premise is the one you have seen a hundred times. The protagonist, Tara Selter, wakes up on the eighteenth of November. The day passes. She goes to sleep. She wakes up. It is the eighteenth of November. Her husband Thomas, who lives with her in a stone house in northern France, has no memory of the previous iteration. She does. It takes a familiar science fiction idea and makes it feel fresh, intimate, and deeply human. I read all five over a week in San Sebastian, sitting in the bright Atlantic light of the Basque coast while reading about a woman who can't leave a single grey rainy day in northern France, and the books were only better for the contrast. Mild spoiler warning: I'll describe the shape of each book but not its turns. Skip to the bottom if you want to come to the cycle clean. The first volume is the small one, around two hundred pages, minimalist in both plot and prose. The minimalism is the point. Tara has returned to Clairon-sous-Bois from a book fair in Paris with a small burn on her hand from a hotel heater and a Roman sestertius in her bag, and we meet her on day one hundred and twenty-two of the loop. By then she has the day memorized to the second. The blackbird sings at the same instant every morning. The cup is where she left it. Thomas, beautifully indifferent to the cosmological catastrophe he is sleeping through, asks her about her trip. She tells him. He listens. He has listened a hundred and twenty-two times. There is something sisyphean about a marriage where one of you has to begin the conversation again from scratch every morning. The writing here is the kind of plain prose that takes a whole career to learn how to write. Short sentences. Present tense. Almo...