What if stories were written in time than in space as we mostly know it? What would happen to characters caught in time and its murky tick-tock? Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I, translated from the Danish by Barbara J Haveland tries to answer these questions. Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, this is the first of a three-book series about a woman stuck in a day.
Tara Selter wakes up every morning to the eighteenth of November. She was in Paris to collect antiquarian books that she sells with her husband in the French countryside. She meets friends and her hand is burnt by a heater in a bookshop. She returns to her room in Paris, falls asleep with an ice-pack and opens her eyes not to the next day but to a repetition of the same day. The burn, however, is still there at the beginning of the day. By and by as she tries to make sense of this limbo, she confronts her inability to see a way out. Thomas, her husband is surprised but can only support her so far. As the day ends, he is back to what Tara imagines. As yet another eighteenth of November approaches, she wonders if she will ever get out of it. Haunting, uncomfortable and original, this Danish novel sparkles with brilliance at every page.
The premise immediately reminds Booker-aficionados of the 2023-International Booker Prize winner Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. Both these novels centre time and life lived inside it. In Gosponidov’s work, this is done through the ‘clinic for the past’ for those suffering from Alzheimer’s; Balle’s story is centred around a woman being stuck in the present. ‘I wanted to find a pattern and break it, but instead we discovered too many unknowns for us to comprehend the mechanics of the day,’ says the narrator as she relieves the same day for the 123rd time. What is most interesting of the two stories is the obsession with objects of the past; Tara and her husband collect old books, coins and sell them. As the novel progresses, we begin to see the place and the value that objects themselves begin to hold in the narrative. From being dispensable and serving economic means to the objects becoming the only way to hold on, Tara’s life stops having meaning without the books on heavenly bodies and drinking water. The role that the missing Roman sestertius plays nails Balle’s vision of the relation between material, memory and time.
{{/usCountry}}The premise immediately reminds Booker-aficionados of the 2023-International Booker Prize winner Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. Both these novels centre time and life lived inside it. In Gosponidov’s work, this is done through the ‘clinic for the past’ for those suffering from Alzheimer’s; Balle’s story is centred around a woman being stuck in the present. ‘I wanted to find a pattern and break it, but instead we discovered too many unknowns for us to comprehend the mechanics of the day,’ says the narrator as she relieves the same day for the 123rd time. What is most interesting of the two stories is the obsession with objects of the past; Tara and her husband collect old books, coins and sell them. As the novel progresses, we begin to see the place and the value that objects themselves begin to hold in the narrative. From being dispensable and serving economic means to the objects becoming the only way to hold on, Tara’s life stops having meaning without the books on heavenly bodies and drinking water. The role that the missing Roman sestertius plays nails Balle’s vision of the relation between material, memory and time.
{{/usCountry}}Throughout the book, as Tara keeps waking up and reliving life, the reader and the protagonist both wonder; what about Thomas, her husband? His mostly silent yet powerful presence in the novel is the only human one besides that of their two bookshop owner friends. The love between Tara and Thomas is heartening to see. For him to wake up each new eighteenth of November and not remember a word his wife had said the previous day exhausts Tara but she repeats herself all the same. ‘We collected details. We stayed alert. We kept our eyes fixed on each other… We talked about love. About whether it could make things happen. About whether love could bring us in or not.’ This shared time capsule is an intense portrayal of love and longing despite the presence of the lover. Norwegian author Dag Solstad writes about a similar love in Shyness and Dignity (2006) where his protagonist is stuck after he realises that he couldn’t teach well anymore and his martial life has come down to a joke. Like Solstad, Balle too offers a portrait of marriage that is no longer equal, where spouses have stopped finding themselves with one another. Like Tara who begins to avoid her husband because she wants him to know that she is not in the house anymore and may be in Paris as was originally thought. ‘Now I am living in a room in a house that is too tight, I have almost outgrown it and sometimes I wander around the town, looking for a new one.’
At a later point, Tara begins to feel like ‘a monster clad in wool’, that she invades ‘space.’ The reader often finds himself wondering what now? What more? Are we going to read the same thing over and over in different sentences and images? It is at this moment that Balle grabs you and puts you face-to-face with a Tara who’s living the same day for the 274th time. The transformation is organic and discomforting. To see a woman slowly become thus; a monster not by a Dr Frankenstein’s flawed science but a product of calculated time that does not end. This is where Balle drives home the point of the book — being stuck in the same place destabilises and turns the individual inside out. Tara eventually pleads: ‘How did I get into it? Did I enter through the wrong door?… I look for exits… I can’t help feeling there’s something I ought to do. That something can be changed.’
Those who enjoy the books of Jon Fosse, Chetna Maroo, Rachel Cusk and Patrick Modiano will definitely see the beauty in Balle’s writing and composition. With sentences that flow seamlessly, the writing and translation is excellent. The precision and attention to detail draws in the reader from the very first page.
After a point, though, it can be exhausting. But then that’s the very nature of the novel; to make the readers as uncomfortable as Tara is.
Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. He writes about books at (@rahulzsing) X and (@fook_bood) Instagram.