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It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for these curious twists of fate.
The first volume of the poetic, page-turning masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.
Tara Selter has slipped out of time.
Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.
She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand - the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband's surprise at seeing her return home unannounced. But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain.
As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can't shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there's a way to escape.
Winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize.
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(15 April 2025)
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It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for these curious twists of fate.
The first volume of the poetic, page-turning masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.
Tara Selter has slipped out of time.
Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.
She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand - the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband's surprise at seeing her return home unannounced. But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain.
As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can't shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there's a way to escape.
Winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize.
On the Calculation of Volume is an extraordinary book. It’s the first of a multi-volume series: Book II will appear at the same time as Book I, and I am genuinely anxious to read it. Book III will follow later in the year, by which time I will be absolutely desperate to know what is happening. I understand that there are seven parts to this project, so this is going to be a wild reading ride requiring some significant patience on the part of English-language readers.
The premise of the work is simple enough: our protagonist Tara wakes up on what she thinks should be the 19th of November only to realise that it’s really the 18th and she’s living this day again. She is caught in this date, and experiences it over and over again, though everyone else around her is moving through it for the first time, every time. She is totally temporally stuck. She tries to work out what to do, how to get out of this date, and her approach to solving this problem evolves over the course of this first book. It would diminish your experience of the book if I tell you too much more than this, but I will say that this book is mind-expanding, opening new ways of thinking about time, memory, repetition, routine, ageing, how we relate to others, and what it is that we are doing with our days on Earth – our precious, limited days. Solvej Balle’s style, translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland, is completely mesmerising, impossible to turn away from, and though I wanted to race through it to find out how things would turn out for Tara, I also wanted to spend as much time with Balle’s words as I possibly could. I came away from this book thinking that I haven’t had the furniture rearranged in my brain so definitively in quite some time. Reading, after all this time, can still be a transformative experience for me, and it’s a real thrill to discover such a book as this.
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