On the Calculation of Volume
Tara Selter wakes every morning on the eighteenth of November. Balle takes a premise that could be a joke and follows its physics and its marriage entirely seriously.
Tara Selter wakes each morning on the eighteenth of November. Balle’s septology takes a premise that could be a joke and treats it with complete seriousness, following the physics of it, the marriage inside it, and the slow accumulation of a life lived in a single day. Danish, and unlike anything else.
Recommended by 3 People
Anton Hur
I think what we ultimately love about this book is how different it feels from the way we tend to live life now, going about our day with our senses deadened and our fingers scrolling through social media feeds, completely in denial of time as it passes. The whole book is a real antidote to the toxic warping of our sense of time and space.
Aysegul Savas
In this novel, a woman wakes up to the same day for every day of a year. The damp November light filtering through her home in Clairon-sous-Bois in France, the sound of the kettle, the opening and closing of doors, the afternoon rain, take on new meaning as we furrow deeper into the time and space.
Maria Popova
In On the Calculation of Volume (public library) — her startlingly original reckoning with the bewilderments of time and love, partway between Einstein’s Dreams and Ulysses — Danish author Solvej Balle offers the best definition of love I’ve encountered since Iris Murdoch’s half a century ago
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