Literary masterpiece that may be the best book of the 21st century

The Herald Scotland

18-05-2025

Balle, a Danish writer, gained international acclaim in 1993 with her short-story collection According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind. She then effectively disappeared, retreating to a small Baltic island. Nobody heard much from her, but that was because she was working on the seven volumes of On the Calculation of Volume.
If only every wrier spent nearly 30 years on their next work. What's emerged from Balle's self-imposed exile is a book which must win the International Booker Prize - for which its already shortisted - and should earn Balle the Nobel Prize. I make no apology for the gushing acclaim. This isn't hyperbole.
If you don't read this, it's like living in the 1920s and not reading Fitzgerald, Woolf, Eliot, Stein or Hemingway.
Balle has made herself the defining writer of this decade, and now competes as one of the greats of this century.
First, ignore the title. I was recently poring over volume two in a cafe in Portugal when a friend asked me why I was reading a physics textbook. I was delighted. It gave me the opportunity to rant at length about why they must read Balle.
On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes One and Two Solvej Balle (Image: unknown)
As yet, I still don't understand the title and I don't really care. There's five more volumes to go, so keep me guessing, Solvej.
Now to the story. One morning, bookseller Tara Selter wakes up in a Paris hotel, comes down for breakfast and notices that another guest dropped a piece of toast just as they'd done the previous morning. Soon, it seems the whole of yesterday is repeating for her. And it is. Tara is trapped in November 18.
This is Groundhog Day as written by Albert Camus, Paul Auster or Milan Kundera. Tara has fallen through time. The rest of the world is unaware time has stopped: every item, creature, weather formation, every star in the sky, repeats its November 18 pattern each day.
Tara, though, knows she's stuck, that the world is on a loop, yet she can do as she pleases, change her day. She's imprisoned, but also free.
Initially, she returns home from her Paris trip to her partner Thomas. Each morning for months, she retells him her story: that she's trapped in time. He loves her, he believes her, but soon the repetition is destroying her.
She's also began noticing some disturbing effects of her condition. Some items stay with her forever, like the money in her pocket. Other items simply vanish. She eats a can of soup but next morning it doesn't reappear.
If Tara stays in one place long enough she would consume everything there, leaving nothing behind. She considers herself a 'plundering monster'. In the 21st century, isn't that what we've all become?
So Tara leaves Thomas. He won't know she's gone, anyway. He'll still think she's on that Paris trip. It's as if everyone around her suffers from the amnesia of dementia.
In a way, Tara no longer exists. If she spots a pretty cottage and the owners are away, Tara can move in and make it hers. It's November 18 forever, remember.
But permanent November breeds winter gloom. By volume two, Tara has decided to travel through Europe, trying to build a real year for herself, with real seasons. She goes far North to experience a true winter with snow, then deep into Spain to recreate summer. Cornwall imitates spring. Germany gives her autumn.
Her attempts to celebrate Christmas with her bewildered but supportive family are among the most moving scenes in the work so far.
Tara is our narrator, meticulously documenting the strangeness of her isolation: 'I count the days and make notes. I do it in order to remember. Or I do it in order to hold the days together. Or perhaps I do it because the paper remembers what I say. As if I existed. As if someone were listening.'
Balle is saying something very profound about modern life in this novel. The world has both broken down and speeded up; our identities are splintered; we're unmoored as a species, adrift and lost; time itself has ceased to make sense on a planet where we face oblivion at our own hand, be it by plundering the Earth or destroying ourselves through war. Our connections are broken - to family, friends and place; we are - each of us - very much on an existential plane.
In a post-truth world, we are all Tara. 'I will never find the explanations I seek,' she says. 'I will only find new questions and new answers.'
There's some added spice for Scottish readers. As you lose yourself in the text, you'll sometimes find yourself arrested by words like 'outwith' and 'swither' jumping off the page. Why is a Danish writer with a taste for wry philosophical speculative fiction employing words that only Scots really use?
It turns out the translator is Scottish. Barbara J Haveland, who now lives in Copenhagen, has done a remarkable job. More prizes here too, please, literary world. Let's crown this great home-grown translator.
I cannot emphasis enough how desperate I am for the next five volumes. Volume Two - each book is short and just rips along - closes as Tara realises she can spend her entire life trying to learn everything there is to know. Over many long, slow months she becomes an expert on ancient Rome, for example.
Tara can attend university lectures wherever she likes, listening to the greatest minds discuss the most complex ideas.
What hasn't occurred to Tara, though, is she could, if she wished, use what's happened to her for evil. She could kill someone and nobody would know. But would her victim return to life or disappear forever like an apple she's eaten?
Balle is both a consummate and profound artist, and a writer who knows how to keep readers turning pages. Volume Two ends on a pitch-perfect cliffhanger. I just hope she doesn't need another decades-long hiatus from the world in preparation for her next masterpiece.