On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize [Paperback]

Utterly riveting, Solvej Balles A masterpiece of its time. A meditation on climate change (because Taras calendar never turns, neither does the weather) and an experiment with fictional form, Balles novel is also a startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time. Balles thrilling seven-volume meditation on time, in a translation from Barbara J. Haveland, nods at speculative protocols and then politely abandons them on the banks of an endless Nov. 18. A quiet meditation on marriage observed from both a terribly near and far distance. Time has come between us, Tara writes, a sentence that could easily speak to the gradual drift in any relationship. Balle communicates something painful about the limits of sharing a life, and perhaps the limits of sharing time at all. The richly strange first book of Danish author Balles seven-part novel is a dreamy, quirky, and?indefinitely prolonged version of Groundhog Day&. The philosophical conundrum at the novels?heart?is grounded in the ordinariness of everyday, domestic life, and the dilemmas of a marriage in which one partner changes and the other doesnt. A cliffhanger will leave readers anxious to read Book Two. Tara Selter, the protagonist of Solvej Balles? 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 doesnt? What would we do? Ask Tara Selter. The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balles miraculous septology, who has been trapped in the same day with no end in sight. On the Calculation of Volume is a literary phenomenon nealã¹