Author: Solvej Balle
Translator: Barbara J. Haveland
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Paperback
Burley Fisher Books of the Year 2025
Lu says… On the Calculation of Volume imagines a woman, Tara Selter, attempting and sculpting a life inside an infinitely repeating November 18th. Initially striking a resemblance in storyline to Groundhog Day, Balle takes the proposition in a profoundly different direction. Tara herself has become unmoored in time, travelling and waking in new places. Just as her mind and memory may evolve from day to day, changes might accumulate in the rest of her body too. Injuries – like her burn – persist, healing normally over time. She ages. Most striking, there is an exception to the daily resetting of the world around her – if she consumes something, it is gone forever. This phenomenon leads Tara to frequently contemplate her own monstrosity, a capacity for devouring the world around her.
Tara’s contemplation brings notions of humanity’s consuming ways to mind, and questions about the consumptive nature of life itself. Surrounded by a sedentary world, where every day is – literally – lived in the same manner, Tara’s seasonal migration reprises a more ancient way of life. Here, perhaps, is the beginning of a solution to the ecological question – a fundamental shift in one’s way of life. Or this might be a solution, if it could last. If Tara’s first year was a lesson on the impossible length of a day, her seasonal journey was in turn a study in the breadth of a day that could contain all parts of a year, and now going into the third volume (recently released), it is the depth of that time which remains. Blending poetry and philosophical inquiry with reflections on the times we the reader find ourselves within, Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume asks us: what is a single person’s responsibility to humanity, and to the preservation of this world?