On the Calculation of Volume (Books I and II) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, New Directions, 2024
Tara Selter, the narrator of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, takes a Roman coin out for walks and believes that a refrigerator is capable of sobbing: “It is quite permissible for a fridge that cannot hold onto its Christmas food to laugh—or cry—like a human being if it wishes.” A reader might reasonably infer that Tara has lost her mind, but there is a method to Tara’s madness, as her thoughts and behavior stem from wholly rational attempts to make sense of her absurd condition: each day, she wakes up on the morning of November 18.
On the Calculation of Volume is a septology, the first five books of which have been published in Balle’s native Denmark. This fall, Books I and II had their English debut in Barbara J. Haveland’s elegant translation from New Directions. The work begins in medias res—as much as is possible for a plot in which time fails to advance—the narrator having already lived with her curious predicament for 121 days. The first sentence is a tonal feint that wouldn’t be out of place in a suspense novel, but here primes the reader for the sense of estrangement that plagues Tara’s recounting: “There is someone in the house.” Identified solely by the sounds he makes, that someone is not an intruder but her husband Thomas, with whom she runs a rare books business. By the time the novel opens, Tara has abandoned explaining her predicament each day and opted to avoid him, thoroughly estranged from a man to whom she once felt molecularly bonded:
Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles…
After four months of November 18ths, her husband has been abstracted into a “someone” and reduced to mere noise, “just sounds in the house.”
The novel soon circles back to November 17, the day “before time fell apart,” when Tara travels from her home in northwestern France to an auction in Bordeaux. She acquires several works—“a fine copy of Boisot’s renowned book on spiders, Atlas des Araignées”—then heads to Paris, where she hunts down another hot title—Histoire des Eaux Potables—and buys her husband a Roman coin, a sestertius, whose striking history she finds analogous to her own:
Once it had just been metal, it had been molten, fluid, formless and then it had stopped at the moment that it was stamped with the images of Antoninus Pius and Annona, a modius, ears of corn and all. Stop. Fixed. Clink. Out onto the pile of newly minted coins. A frozen moment.
Tara carries these and other objects (her house key, rare books and notepads, a dress she “trains” to stay with her) across the temporal fault. They are the materials with which she arms herself throughout her ordeal, the mementos talismans and books literal vade mecums.
In the only notable incident of the evening before time stops, she burns her hand on a heater. Before bed, in her last phone conversation with her husband, she complains about her painful burn: “…we had a little laugh at my thoughtlessness: it wasn’t the first time I had come to grief for not heeding, as Thomas put it, the basic principles of cause and effect.” The irony of this statement only grows as the weight of cause and effect drifts away in tandem with the progression of time, and instills in Tara the notion that she is in some way responsible for the rupture, or that she should be able to find a mending solution. Tara’s attempts to decode the underlying logic of her situation and discover a way “to be let back into time” constitute the engrossing drama of these first two books, which conclude on a dramatic milestone (the one-year anniversary of her time loop) and a cliffhanger, respectively.
The septology’s title reflects the methodical nature of Tara’s efforts to take her situation in hand by noticing, reenacting, and experimenting. On the Calculation of Volume evokes the eighteenth-century illustrated manuscripts in which her business specializes, faintly echoing another multi-volume investigation into time, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Simultaneously, it signals that this novel will be a methodical work of counting (days, pizza boxes) and its narrative cousin, recounting. “Volume” is both prosaic and slightly jarring, given that Tara’s predicament might seem to warrant a more temporal object of calculation such as days or months. As the novel proceeds, however, volume turns out to be one of Tara’s central concerns: how much space a person, an object, even the Roman empire takes up in the world. As her temporal landscape shrinks to one day, she herself expands. “I am no longer sure there is space for me here,” Tara says, and later, “I invade space, I fill the world…I can feel the spare room tightening around me. Like wet clothes one is outgrowing.”
When Tara buys an item from the grocery store, that item does not reappear on the shelves on her next November 18. The endless siphoning of her local supermarket’s supply begins to wear at her, and she becomes preoccupied with her consumption in a tightening environment. Her commitment to sustainability leads her to adapt her habits: “I choose my purchases according to what there is the most of and which shelves are the fullest and buy unknown cans of fish, bags or weird powdered soups or cookies I’ve never tasted.” She scans gardens for unpicked fruit, “looking for pieces of the world that nobody will use.” These small gestures stand out because they are forward-looking—even optimistic. They are efforts to orient herself toward a future despite a condition that seemingly deprives her of one.
As the story continues, scarcity alters Tara’s conception of herself and her appetites. She pictures herself as a “ravening monster” consuming everything in her path: “It was me who made things disappear. That must be it. I am living in a time that eats up the world…How long can my little world endure me?” The word monster derives from the Latin monere, to warn; Tara’s obsession with the term throughout the novel raises the suspicion that her frozen November 18 is more than just her own personal curse—rather, it could be an ominous portent of a disaster looming sometime in the series.
As it stands in the first part of the septology, Tara is still wholly alone in her temporal calamity. While her consumption of material goods declines, she grows ever more ravenous for immaterial information. Late in the second book, she becomes obsessed with the Roman Empire, feeding on its history: “I am a monster who wants to know more. I plunder their history at two thousand years’ remove and now I cannot get enough of it.” She first notes that “Rome is eternal and the empire knows no bounds,” with a hint of optimism that she has found a fittingly monstrous subject, one she can’t exhaust. But Tara’s world has a habit of butting up against its limits, and she eventually realizes, in a slightly baffling historiographical insight, that “everything in the Roman world is a container…everything the Romans touch becomes a container,” from blown glass to cups to flacons and vases and amphoras and cauldrons and wicker baskets. To contain is also to exclude or constrain: “The boundless empire has been walled in, it is a bowl, a vessel and the Romans get no further.” She extends an archaeological argument into a metaphysical one—the Roman Empire is neither eternal nor boundless—and then (as with the coin), finds her own situation within it. “I’m not sure whether I want to escape from my container,” says Tara. “Maybe I’ll stay here. Maybe I’m like the Romans. Maybe I built it myself.” This presents a slight fillip in the fictional contract: Could Tara be as mad as Quixote, constructing her version of an enchanted—or cursed—world with its own principles of cause and effect? Tara’s eccentric Roman historiography could also be read as a sort of autofiction, as Balle has long lived on Aero, a Danish island about twelve miles long—her extraordinary, if not monstrous, feat of imagination spilling over from a little container in the Baltic Sea.
On the Calculation of Volume is a mix of pensive reflection, scientific reasoning, and bone-dry humor, following a mind trying to come to terms with shifting temporal and spatial contours. Haveland does an excellent job with each register within the limited affective confines of the novel. Adrift though she may be, Tara proceeds deliberately, calmly confronting her circumstances with short declarative propositions—often beginning with the same subject (“I may have . . . I am in . . . I had taken . . .”)— or dependent clause sentence fragments (“That . . . That . . .That . . .”). These both mirror the repetitive nature of her life and lead, in measured steps, to amusingly off-kilter destinations: “No one can tell that I am training a dress to stay with me.” Haveland maintains a faint comic twinkle that might otherwise have been obscured by the narrator’s incessant ratiocination. The prose’s rhythm is consistent, with Haveland only occasionally, and judiciously, employing the comma splice so ubiquitous in contemporary European translations. These are reserved for rare moments of despair or resignation when Tara’s rational bulwark has cracked. Defeated and wandering Paris in the beginning of Book II, Tara says: “…I throw myself into the crowd, I let myself be carried along, I am in motion, I go with the current…”
Just as the work itself has been translated from one language to another, On the Calculation of Volume is a novel about a woman who has been transmuted from one time to another. A dominant aspect of Tara’s transmutation is the notion that language, permutable, can shape her static reality. After returning home from Paris, her condition begins to alter her relationship to language. This shift occurs first at the temporal level: “We kept the conversation neutral,” Tara says of her conversations with Thomas in the early days of her time loop, when she still brings him up to speed about her condition each morning. “I scrupulously avoided using words we would interpret differently, terms such as yesterday or the day before yesterday.” She settles into a new rhythm with him, waking up after the nightly reset to the “undefined morning” and gauzy vision, “as if the day were trying to arrive unclothed, neutral, devoid of attributes.” She searches for a linguistic explanation for the curiously featureless day:
I don’t know what is going on. Whether time is switched off at night, whether past and future appear during slumber and are not invoked again until one wakes. Or whether it is the words that are erased, leaving only the outline of things. Maybe it is language that shuts down, so one wakes up wordless or with words only for the most immediate concepts: morning, now, here, awake, light. Maybe one wakes without sentences. Or with the simplest sentences, which unfold as one wakes up. Now it is morning. Here is a day. I am awake.
Tara and her husband exist comfortably in this prelinguistic Eden, making love and “creat[ing] a bright space out of dazed, gray confusion.” The enchantment fades, however, as her vision begins to sharpen and their inquiry into “parataxic views of time and variable chronometry” yield few helpful insights. Their time begins to diverge, separating them into two temporal territories “that bounded on one another, with frontier feuds and obscure inter-zone transactions.”
This is until the narrator wakes up in a “mood,” which in this novel of small shifts constitutes a major plot point. With this mood comes a new language:
It is my mood that chooses the words for me. I have a mood. There is a lot you can do with such a thing. It can select words from the whole lexical palette, it can call language a palette, it can give things colors, even when they have no colors. I talk to no one, but my world acquires more and more details, I pluck words from a world with many voices, from a mood that lends color, that rubs off. But lending color to things takes up space. The palette overflows with hues. Too many words pour in, the day becomes heavier, slower, comes to a halt.
This lexical awakening first enlivens, then saturates, the day—another instance of Tara negotiating between her expansive presence and her bounded world. Her profusive language having filled the day to the brim, Tara turns to stargazing, where she can be a “very tiny monster in an immense space.”
The second volume, which could be subtitled “A Book of Seasons,” continues to chart the way language manifests reality. Having endured one year of purgatory, Tara decides to remake her reality by leaving home—and its perpetually damp, cold November 18—and imposing seasons on her calendar. First stop: winter in Finland, where she embraces her inner snowman and cultivates her “mind of winter,” to quote Wallace Stevens.
I have winter now, I am in Finland and I have gone into hibernation…and I find dictionaries and try to learn new winter languages in my house…I see myself returning here year after year, hibernating here, and each year I will pick up more words. I will find words for pillows and sheets and other bed linen…I will introduce doors and windows to my winter language, I will add forests and roads and towns, new words that grow every year, a language that grows in cold and snow, and winter will come, and spring and summer and autumn again, and I will come back and find more words. Something is growing. I am starting to imagine a future. Thanks, winter language.
Tara’s diary of numbered November days (from #121 to #1144) seems to be reminiscent, but here language points ahead, allowing her to envision a world beyond her discursive loop. In this passage about teaching herself a new language, Haveland briefly employs a new, more informal tone (“Thanks, winter language”), which is positively jaunty compared to the stately tread throughout.
Buoyed by her efforts, Tara methodologically constructs her “seasons machine,” soliciting the data of a meteorologist (“Thanks, meteorologist”) to find European locales that would approximate various seasons on November 18. She migrates to England after winter, finding spring in a London grocery market despite being confused by the “seasonal havoc” on display on its teeming produce shelves. Language, though, again determines her chosen reality: “In the end it was the words that came to my rescue and made for the check-out with my basket of spring names: spring greens, spring onions and a plastic tub of spring soup.” She heads southwest to Cornwall, where “sheep farmers had started bringing their lambs into the world in mid-autumn instead of having the spring lambs which Nature preferred to produce.” This is the closest Balle comes to the allegorical, hinting that the world—through climate change and globalized commerce—is as dislocated as Tara. Resources are finite, appetites are monstrous, and it is becoming easier and easier to find spring and summer in whatever season.
After summering in Montpellier, Tara finds autumn in Dusseldorf, where she embraces a Lotus Eaters existence: “What do I want with seasons when I have come to a halt in a warm and golden eternity? A gentle repetition.” Her impulse to rest is natural. Tara has strained to write her way into a seasonal reality, willing herself to bridge the gap between fiction and reality while recognizing the ultimate impossibility of doing so: “I can always sense November, but I write September.” In this reflection on alternate textual realties, I hear a “gentle repetition” of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, another novel whose narrator is at once confined and erring, as well as prone to calculations:
Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
Molloy’s story ends here. After two parts of a seven-part series and 1,144 days waiting for November 19, Tara’s has just begun.
Matt Seidel is a writer and translator living in the Boston area. His translation of Jacques Sternberg’s L’Employé will be published by Wakefield Press this summer, and his reviews, features, and other writing can be found here.
*****
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