On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize
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On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize by Solvej Balle
Utterly riveting, Solvej Balles On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavias most important literary award) for being a masterpiece of its time.
"Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetitionYou 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
"An unparalleled cliffhanger." -- Morgenbladet
"The Danish novelist went into exile on an island for more than twenty years to write On the Calculation of Volume, which has become an international phenomenon." -- Le Figaro
"Solvej Balle writes with relentless consequence, consistency, concise uncanniness, and a singular dry intensity. Original, glistening with beauty." -- Erik Skyum-Nielsen - Information
"A masterpiece of its time." -- jury of the Nordic Council Literary Prize
"Solvej Balle uses language as a flashlight and a shovel, alternately illuminating and eroding the foundation of the existence we know as ours." -- Klassekampen
"This novel is filled with a tactile, concrete and aptly existence-affirming universe, captured in sparkling sentences." -- Vårt Land
"A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down." -- Kate Briggs
"A hypnotic feat of prose writing, and the first in a septology… Book II (which moves beyond Selter’s repeated Nov. 18), is simultaneously published, so you needn’t wait for the next translation to see where the series goes next." -- John Vincler - Cultured Mag
""A sober, thoughtful study of time and connection." " -- Kirkus Reviews
"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)
""What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn’t? What would we do? Ask Tara Selter. The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle’s miraculous septology, who has been trapped in the same day with no end in sight. On the Calculation of Volume is 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."" -- Cat Zhang - New York Magazine
""At once a meditation on climate change (because Tara’s calendar never turns, neither does the weather) and an experiment with fictional form, Balle’s novel is also a startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time."" -- The New Yorker
"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. Her days are compared to a beach, a stream, a puzzle, a construction, a container. "I haven’t found a way out of the eighteenth of November," she laments at the end of the second volume. As readers, we are only beginning to figure out how to navigate this beguiling, haunting novel, wherever it ends up taking us." -- Morton Hoi Jensen - The Washington Post
"A meditation on climate change (because Tara’s calendar never turns, neither does the weather) and an experiment with fictional form, Balle’s novel is also a startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time." -- The New Yorker
"An unparalleled cliffhanger." -- Morgenbladet
"The Danish novelist went into exile on an island for more than twenty years to write On the Calculation of Volume, which has become an international phenomenon." -- Le Figaro
"Solvej Balle writes with relentless consequence, consistency, concise uncanniness, and a singular dry intensity. Original, glistening with beauty." -- Erik Skyum-Nielsen - Information
"A masterpiece of its time." -- jury of the Nordic Council Literary Prize
"Solvej Balle uses language as a flashlight and a shovel, alternately illuminating and eroding the foundation of the existence we know as ours." -- Klassekampen
"This novel is filled with a tactile, concrete and aptly existence-affirming universe, captured in sparkling sentences." -- Vårt Land
"A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down." -- Kate Briggs
"A hypnotic feat of prose writing, and the first in a septology… Book II (which moves beyond Selter’s repeated Nov. 18), is simultaneously published, so you needn’t wait for the next translation to see where the series goes next." -- John Vincler - Cultured Mag
""A sober, thoughtful study of time and connection." " -- Kirkus Reviews
"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)
""What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn’t? What would we do? Ask Tara Selter. The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle’s miraculous septology, who has been trapped in the same day with no end in sight. On the Calculation of Volume is 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."" -- Cat Zhang - New York Magazine
""At once a meditation on climate change (because Tara’s calendar never turns, neither does the weather) and an experiment with fictional form, Balle’s novel is also a startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time."" -- The New Yorker
"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. Her days are compared to a beach, a stream, a puzzle, a construction, a container. "I haven’t found a way out of the eighteenth of November," she laments at the end of the second volume. As readers, we are only beginning to figure out how to navigate this beguiling, haunting novel, wherever it ends up taking us." -- Morton Hoi Jensen - The Washington Post
"A meditation on climate change (because Tara’s calendar never turns, neither does the weather) and an experiment with fictional form, Balle’s novel is also a startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time." -- The New Yorker
Solvej Balle, born in 1962, made her debut in 1986 with the novel Lyrefugl, and went on to write the highly acclaimed 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”). She has also published a book on aesthetics, a political memoir, and two books of short prose. On the Calculation of Volume heralds the arrival of a major literary artist. Barbara J. Haveland (born 1951) is a Scottish literary translator, resident in Copenhagen. She translates fiction, poetry and drama from Danish and Norwegian to English. She has translated works by many leading Danish and Norwegian writers, both classic and contemporary, including Henrik Ibsen, Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann and Carl Frode Tiller.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780811237253 |
| ISBN 10 | 0811237257 |
| Title | On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize |
| Author | Solvej Balle |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | New Directions Publishing Corporation |
| Year published | 2024-11-26 |
| Number of pages | 160 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |