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by Solvej Balle
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."
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."
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (5/7/2026)
This week I finished Black Messiahs by Steven A Holmes. It was a WWII story from the perspectives of Black brothers who enlisted in the US Army and a dual storyline of a Polish Jew named Daniel. I liked it. Also finished The Secret of Snow by Tina Harnesk. This is about the Sami people of the Nor...
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2025 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists
Here's the list of the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. Which have you read and which are standouts? Are there any you'd like to add to your list that you haven't already? Autobiography/Memoir : Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking) Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy ...
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What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (12/25/2025)
I finished https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/22061/cursed-daughters Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Bathwaite and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I like pondering the question of the curse: Is it real, or does it only impact the women of this family be...
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Am I the only person who does this?
Haha, well, since you asked, @Jill_Mercier , I have time for two from the following list: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood A Drop of Corruption (second book in a sci-fi series by Robert Jackson Bennett I li...
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Publishers Weekly Top 10/Top 150
Publishers Weekly just released their top 150 for the year (150? Really? Seems like a lot to me.) Their Top 10: https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4991/audition Audition by Katie Kitamura The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones Capitalism and Its Critics: A History...
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2025 National Book Awards Finalists Announced
Here's the list! Which ones have you read? Which are on your radar? Fiction : Rabih Alameddine, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief Karen Russell, The Antidote Ethan Rutherford, North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther Bryan Wa...
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What books have you enjoyed so far in 2025, what books are you looking forward to reading?
My best of the first half of 2025: 5⭐️ Don't Cry for Me by Daniel Black Black in Blues by Imani Perry Freedom is a Feast by Alejandro Puyana The Puzzle Box by Danielle Trussoni 4.5⭐️ The Power Broker by Robert Caro The Slip by Lucas Schaefer Spell Freedom by Elaine Weiss Fundamentally by Nussaiba...
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"There are no easy answers in this deeply mysterious tale. Readers won't be able to look away." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The richly strange first book of Danish author Balle's seven-part novel is a dreamy, quirky, and indefinitely prolonged version of Groundhog Day…. The philosophical conundrum at the novel's heart is grounded in the ordinariness of everyday, domestic life, and the dilemmas of a marriage in which one partner changes and the other doesn't. A cliffhanger will leave readers anxious to read Book Two." ―Booklist (starred review)
"A sober, thoughtful study of time and connection." ―Kirkus Reviews
This information about On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Solvej Balle was born in 1962, made her debut in 1986 with Lyrefugl, and she went on to write one of the 1990s' most acclaimed works of Danish literature, According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind (praised by Publishers Weekly for its blend of "sly humor, bleak vision, and terrified sense of the absurd with a tacit intuition that the world has a meaning not yet fathomed"). Since then, she's published a book on art theory, Det umuliges kunst, 2005, a political memoir Frydendal og andre gidsler, 2008, and two books of short prose Hvis and Så, published simultaneously in 2013. On the Calculation of Volume is Solvej Balle's major comeback, not just to Danish or Nordic fiction, but―expanding the possibilities of the novel―to all of world literature.
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