Repetitive strain: On the Calculation of Volume, Books I and II, by Solvej Balle, reviewed

Spectator

28-05-2025

I have counted the days. It is my 122nd eighteenth of November. I have come a long way from the seventeenth and I do not know whether I will ever see the nineteenth. But the eighteenth arrives again and again.
This is life for Tara Selter, the protagonist of On the Calculation of Volume, a mesmerising projected septology by the Danish writer Solvej Balle that will make anyone who has ever longed to pause time rethink their wish list.
Book I, published in Denmark in 2020 and on this year's International Booker Prize longlist, opens on Day 121. Tara, an antiquarian bookseller, is hiding from her husband Thomas in the spare room of their cottage in Clairon-sous-Bois, a fictional town in northern France. She follows his movements by the sounds he makes, from the gush of water through the pipes when he fills a kettle to the faint click when he turns on the gas. She is hiding because she can't face explaining to him – yet again – how she fell through a rift in time one autumn morning in Paris, while away for two nights on a book-buying trip.
Despite burning her hand on an old gas heater, everything had gone to plan, until waking on what should have been 19 November at the Hôtel du Lison, Tara's regular Parisian bolthole. First, the newspaper had the same stories as the previous day. Then, at breakfast, Tara watched the same hotel guest drop the same slice of white bread as the previous morning. It was the same day, happening all over again. 'The weather, too, was the same.