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Solvej Balle was born in 1962, made her debut in 1986 with Lyrefugl, and went on to write According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind. She’s also published a book on art theory, a political memoir, and two books of short prose. More about this author >
Barbara J. Haveland, a Scottish literary translator, resides in Copenhagen. She translates fiction, poetry, and drama by many leading Danish and Norwegian writers, both classic and contemporary, into English, including Henrik Ibsen, Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann, and Carl Frode Tiller. More about this author >
Filed in the following archives
Translated from the Danish
From the publisher:
Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November 18th 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 18th of November.”)
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her memories of the past light up inside the text like old-fashioned 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 (the thrilling shifts, the minute movements, the slant wit, the slowing of time), and its spell is utterly intoxicating.
