Latest news with #Balle
The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: Literary masterpiece may be the best book of the 21st century
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.
The Herald Scotland
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Literary masterpiece that may be the best book of the 21st century
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.
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
International Booker Prize Shortlist: 6 Books to Talk About
A satire of expatriate life in trendy Berlin, a tale of an antiquarian book dealer stuck in a time loop, and a fictionalized retelling of a migrant boat tragedy in the English Channel, are among the six titles that will compete for this year's International Booker Prize, the award's organizers announced on Tuesday. Perhaps the highest profile title on the shortlist for the prize for fiction translated into English is Solvej Balle's 'On the Calculation of Volume: 1' about a bookseller who relives the same day over and over again. Balle's novel, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, was a nominee for last year's National Book Award for translated literature, and many critics have raved about it since its release last year. Hilary Leichter, in a review for the The New York Times, said that in Balle's hands 'the time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions.' The six shortlisted titles — four of which are under 200 pages — also include Vincenzo Latronico's 'Perfection,' translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes, about an expatriate couple living in a hip Berlin neighborhood and struggling to engage with life outside their bubble. Ryan Ruby, in a review for The Times, said that 'with ethnographic precision, Latronico taxonomizes the tastes, attitudes, vanities and blind spots of the people we now call digital nomads.' Established in 2005, the International Booker Prize was originally given to an author for their life's work, but since 2016 has been awarded to a single book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland. It comes with prize money of 50,000 pounds, about $64,000, which the winning author and translator share equally. Last year's award went to Jenny Erpenbeck's 'Kairos' translated by Michael Hofmann. Previous winners have included Georgi Gospodinov's 'Time Shelter' and Han Kang's 'The Vegetarian.' Max Porter, the author and chair of this year's judging panel, said in a news release that the 'mind-expanding' shortlist was 'a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity.' The books 'don't shut down debate, they generate it,' he added. Along with Balle's and Latronico's novels, the other shortlisted titles are: The judges will announce a winner on May 20 during a ceremony at Tate Modern in London.
The Independent
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
International Booker Prize shortlist 2025: ‘Truly disturbing and achingly beautiful' global stories
The shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2025 has been announced, with 'mind-expanding' titles promising to awaken an appetite 'to question the world around us'. Celebrating the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories published in the UK, the prestigious award showcases the best literary works from across the globe. This year's list features titles that could become the first Danish, Italian, or Japanese winners. Marking a first for the prize, all books are independently published, a first for the prize. They are translated from five original languages, including Kannada for the first time – the mother tongue of 38 million people. Many of the books have been decades in the making, with three authors making the shortlist with their first English language publications. All writers are the winners of literary plaudits in their home countries. A panel of judges whittled down their shortlist from a longlist of 13, selected from 154 books submitted by publishers – the highest number since the prize was launched in its current format in 2016. The winning book will be announced at a ceremony held at the Tate modern in London on 20 May 2025, as the gallery celebrates its 25th anniversary. The announcement will also be live-streamed on the Booker Prize social media channels. The winner will be awarded £50,000 to split between author and translator. We've listed the finalists below: On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle Balle's work was initially self-published before becoming a word-of-mouth sensation. He first came up with the idea for the book in the 1980s. In the first part of the Danish writer's septology his protagonist Tara Selter finds herself stuck in a time-loop unable to escape the day of 18 November. Balle initially felt the concept was 'foolish' especially after Hollywood's release of Groundhog Day. But in an instance of life imitating art, the idea kept returning to Balle, until he 'realised that the only way out was to write it'. Judges described the story as a 'meditation' with the translator describing its prose as 'taut and spare'. Small Boat, Vincent Delecroix Examining migrant crossings, described by judges as the 'urgent question of our time', philosopher Delecroix does not seek to cast a 'moral judgment' on the phenomenon, which costs countless lives every year. He hopes readers will face a 'deep discomfort' as well as a 'moral shock'. The story, translated into French, explores the capsizing of a dinghy as it crosses the channel, leading to 27 deaths. It explores how and why the tragedy happened. Under the Eye of the Big Bird, Hiromi Kawakami The meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March 2011 compelled Kawakami to write her novel. In a future where humans are nearing extinction, and have settled in small tribes across the world, with children created in factories from the remnants of rabbits and dolphins. It has taken over a decade for the story to be translated into English and could be the first Japanese title to win the Prize. 'The visionary strangeness is truly enchanting,' say the judges. Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico Latronico tried for years to write a story set at the intersection between our physical and digital lives before drafting Perfection. The story, translated from the Italian, seeks to explore the 'emptiness of contemporary existence'. It follows a millennial couple as they live their dream life as digital nomads in Berlin, but beneath the veneer of fulfilment creeps boredom and unhappiness. Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq The first book in Kannada to ever feature on the shortlist, Mushtaq's 12 tales of Muslim women living in communities in southern India, were originally published between 1990 and 2023 before being compiled. The stories explore 'how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them'. The book has drawn both censure and criticism from some parts of the Muslim community as well as accolades from Indian literary circles. A Leopard-Skin Hat, Anne Serre After the suicide of her younger sister, aged 43, with whom she had a close bond, Serre was moved to write A Leopard-Skin Hat. The French writer subsequently wrote a story that follows the book's narrator through their close bond with a childhood friend. It is described as 'the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell'. Max Porter, chair of the judges said: 'Our selected six awakened an appetite in us to question the world around us: How am I seeing or being seen? How are we translating each other, all the time? How are we trapped in our bodies, in our circumstances, in time, and what are our options for freedom? Who has a voice? In discussing these books we have been considering again and again what it means to be a human being now. 'This list is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity. These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive. They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. 'Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful. They are each highly specific windows onto a world, but they are all gorgeously universal.'
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A different philosophy of things': how Solvej Balle got ahead of Groundhog Day's time
If you've heard about Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume I, longlisted for this year's International Booker prize, you may have experienced a sensation that is central to the Danish writer's brand of philosophical speculative fiction: deja vu. In Balle's five-book opus (of a planned septology), the first three of which won the prestigious Nordic Council literature prize in 2022, someone wakes up to find they are reliving the same day over and over. Their partner, family, neighbours: they all experience this day for the first time in their life. Only the protagonist has been there before. That person is a woman called Tara rather than a man called Phil, and the day is 18 November rather than 2 February, but the plot resemblance to Groundhog Day is striking. The only thing is: Balle got there first. When Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell and the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil hit the big screen in 1993, the kernel of Balle's story had already been stewing in her brain for six years. An obsession in her 20s with James Joyce's Ulysses – set entirely on 16 June 1904 – had led her to wonder how much a single day could contain: 'The thing that fascinated me most was the question: how can one day be so voluminous?' She decided on the title in 1989, though she didn't start writing for another 10 years and the first volume wasn't published in Danish for another 20. Watching someone turn her idea into a box-office hit in the meantime was a relief rather than a blow: 'I thought, 'Oh, that's nice, somebody's helped me to do some research and gone in a direction I wasn't going to go anyway.'' Because even when Bill Murray tries to kill himself in increasingly gruesome ways, he keeps on waking the next day. 'That's a very clear body-soul split; his soul just continues all the way through.' In On the Calculation of Volume, the balance of mind and matter is a more cryptic affair: Tara Selter, a rare-book seller in her late 20s living in rural France, may be caught in a time loop, but she's still tied to the material world. Her hair grows, her body ages, a burn on her skin slowly heals. Food she eats is missing from the fridge the next day. There's a rare Roman coin that vanishes and then reappears, a coffee grinder that has to be bought several times before it stays. The parallel universe that Tara has fallen into has 'a different philosophy of things', and the hypnotic appeal of Balle's fiction lies in the fact that her protagonist is not merely a hero seeking to escape a predicament, but an inquiring scientific mind earnestly trying to unravel its fixed laws. Balle herself has moved through life in non-linear ways. Born in 1962 in South Jutland, she has 'done all the things you shouldn't do if you wanted a career'. During her high-school years, she zigzagged between Denmark and Paris, where she first worked as an au pair and then caught the writing bug, hanging out at legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company. She studied literature for a while and then took a degree in philosophy but didn't finish it until she was 56. Her debut novel Lyrefugl (Lyrebird) was published when she was 22, but it was her 1993 book According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind that truly made a mark. A quartet of interlinked philosophical parables that was translated into multiple languages, it turned the heads of literary Copenhagen. 'I remember thinking, this is world literature,' recalls Jes Stein Pedersen, literary editor of Danish broadsheet Politiken. 'It was a truly original voice.' But, in May 2005, Balle swapped the Danish capital for Ærø, a small island with a population of just under 6,000 people in what Danes call the 'rotten banana', the peripheral belt of marshland and islands in the southern part of Denmark. 'I was kind of unhappy with the Danish publishing world, which became more and more commercial, more and more about bestsellers and all that shit.' But she laughs at the idea that she became a recluse and stopped writing, as some critics have claimed. 'Denmark's cultural scene is as centralised as England's: if you move out of Copenhagen, it's almost like dying,' she laughs. 'This idea that I am about to make my comeback is nonsense – I was there all the time.' After publishing a book of art criticism and a political memoir, Balle set up her own publishing house, Pelagraf, in 2011, bringing out two books of short minimalist fiction, If and Then, and the first five parts of her septology. She is dismissive of the suggestion that life on a small island may feel much like the repetitive time loops that her character experiences. 'Here, at least, there's the summer where you're doing certain things and then there's a winter – in the city people do the same things all the time,' she says. 'Nowadays, cities are so much more conventional than the countryside, whereas it used to be the opposite.' She did find it easier to focus on the ever-expanding universe of Tara's 18 November away from the city, she concedes. 'I had to have more space in order to be able to keep all the bits in my head at the same time,' she says. She used to sing in the local choir but had to stop because she couldn't hear so many voices concurrently. 'I can sometimes go for days without seeing anyone.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion At the beginning of the first volume, Tara is romantically and professionally intertwined with her husband, Thomas, who is also a rare-book dealer, with her scoping out new acquisitions and him managing the sales from home. Tara tells her partner about her predicament, and even amid their confusion they are happy: she likens their relationship to a 'quiet weather system with no natural disasters'. Is On the Calculation of Volume a love story? 'When I started out, I had the feeling that I was writing a love story,' Balle says. 'But was it only a love story? I don't think so.' If her books are an investigation into what is truly essential to the human condition once our routines are hollowed out by repetition, then book one concludes that love isn't it. By the end, Tara has left Thomas behind in the countryside. What Tara truly cannot do without, it turns out, is not the weather system of her matrimonial love, but the actual weather. In book two she travels to southern and northern Europe to recreate the seasonal change that the time loop has taken from her. She becomes increasingly concerned about her consumption of resources and her inability to regrow them. What set out as a love story turns into a parable about humanity's abusive relationship with the natural world. Can the time loop be broken; can Tara escape her fate? In part three, which Faber will publish in English in November, translated as the others have been by Barbara J Haveland, Balle's protagonist encounters other loopers, and there are some shoots of hope. But, by the sound of it, the author herself hasn't found all the answers to the mysteries of the world that have grown inside her head for nigh on four decades. She's currently plugging away at volume six, and wrestling with quantum physics and Epicurus. 'I like the idea that you're allowed to keep your brain while going into a book,' she says. 'I don't know why we've got brains if they can't be part of literature.' On the Calculation of Volume I and II by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland, is published by Faber. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
