July 11, 2025

On the Calculation of Volume 1, by Solvej Balle

I will only mention Bill Murray this once, and not even name his film’s title that’s become iconic enough to eclipse the film itself, standing in for a narrative approach so overdone that it might be hard to imagine it could be made interesting. And then along comes Danish writer Solvej Balle with a request for us to hold her beer after she, according to a blurb on the back of her novel from LE FIGARO , “went into exile on an island for more than twenty years” and returned with ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME, whose first two volumes have been translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland, the first of which I read on a camping trip the weekend before last.

The premise is this. Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller, has just spent the last 121 days awakening every morning to another November 18 (alas, without Sonny and Cher). It all started on a business trip to Paris, unfathomably strange. Eventually she makes her way back to the home in Northern France that she shares with her husband, Thomas, who is also her business partner, and when we find her, she is hiding out in her spare room because she eventually tired of having to explain to Thomas day after day what she was doing at home instead of Paris, where she’s supposed to be.

This is a quiet narrative, as confined as Tara is within a single day, a limited geography (though apparently the world expands in subsequent volumes). She comes to know all the patterns, when she’ll hear birdsong, when her husband returns home, what the weather will be, everything always the same, although there are strange deviations—sometimes things she acquires one day travels with her into her next day, and other days these acquisitions disappear. Trying to figure out some kind of pattern or logic beneath what’s happening to her becomes a major preoccupations in the her first 50 days or so, but eventually her energy in that direction peters out.

Tara’s loneliness permeates the text, the relief of finding her beloved Thomas eventually ceasing to satisfy her because she realizes how fundamentally she’s alienated from him, even when they are fortunate enough to be together. She realizes that she’s embarked upon a journey that he cannot be part of, no matter how much he wants to be, no matter how much they love each other—which reminds me of what couples experience when one is undergoing a serious illness or even dying, the impossibility of true togetherness, the meagreness of the togetherness they have.

I happen to be rereading Frankenstein right now, and recognize a similar tone in the two novel’s first-person addresses, Tara too a kind of monster, outside the ordinary, people responding to her situation with confusion and disbelief. She spends the novel similarly skulking in the margins (she refers to herself as a ghost), peering in lit windows, set apart from the ordinariness of human experience which she so longs for.

The Calculation of Volume tells an extraordinary story, but what its narrator goes through will be familiar to many readers, underlining the story’s poignancy. This very specific, unlikely tale brings with it a certain universality. Tara tells us, “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. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simple cannot comprehend how small and how many there are… Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case…”