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Spectator
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Repetitive strain: On the Calculation of Volume, Books I and II, by Solvej Balle, reviewed
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.
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.
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Scotsman
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Booker Prize: The international-shortlisted literary translator who 'sneaks in' Scottish words
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... An International Booker Prize-shortlisted literary translator has told how she 'sneaks in' Scottish words to all of her books. Scottish translator Barbara J Haveland, who is nominated for the major award for her translation of On the Calculation of Volume I by Danish author Solvej Balle, said she liked to use words including 'outwith' and 'forenoon', as well as 'swither' at least once in each of her translations. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad On the Calculation of Volume, translated from Danish by a Scottish translator, is among six books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. | Booker Prize The novel, the first of a seven-part series by Ms Balle, is one of six books in the running for the title. It made the cut from the longlist to the shortlist last month, scooping a prize of £2,500-£5,000 for the author and £2,500 for the translator. The overall winning International Booker Prize book will be revealed at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London on Tuesday. Ms Haveland said: 'I have this thing - and I have had for all of these 33 years [that I've worked as a translator]. In every book I will try try my absolute best to get into sneaking in at least an 'outwith' or a 'forenoon'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It's a little thing with me that I try to get in at least once, and all of these editors come along and say 'what is this word?' And I always argue the case for it. It's a little point of pride with me.' The book, which was originally self-published in Denmark by Ms Balle and became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, is part of a septology that sees the protagonist stuck in the same day. The first three volumes were snapped up in a six-way auction by Faber in the UK and the original Danish version won the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize. Ms Haveland said she had been about to retire when Ms Balle, whom she had worked with almost 30 years earlier, contacted her. She has now agreed to translate the second volume of the series, but insists she will pass on the mantel to another translator for Volume III onwards. 'I've been lucky over the 30 years I've been translating literary fiction to have some great books come across my desk,' she said. 'There are ones I've been very enthusiastic about, but this is something else. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Honestly, I thought 'oh, God, if there's one book I have to do as my last book, it just has to be this, because it's just amazing'.' Danish author Solvej Balle wrote On the Calculation of Volume. | Sarah Hartvigsen Juncker Ayrshire-born Ms Haveland, who is based in Copenhagen, translates fiction, poetry and drama from Danish and Norwegian to English. If the book were to win, she would scoop a £25,000 prize. Ms Balle would take home the same amount. Former bookseller Ms Haveland, who cites her greatest literary inspiration as her former high school English teacher, author William McIlvanney, has translated works by Danish and Norwegian writers, both classic and contemporary, including Henrik Ibsen, Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann and Carl Frode Tiller. Ms Haveland and Ms Balle both believe there has been a surge of interest in translated fiction, partly due to an increase in popularity of subtitled film and TV on streaming platforms such as Netflix. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ms Balle said: 'I felt in the 1990s, there was a huge gap between at least a lot of European literature and the British American literature. But I just think we've got closer to each other literature wise more recently.' Barbara J Haveland is the Scotland-born translator of the book. | Faber
The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Love Groundhog Day and Russian Doll? These are the novels for you
Florence Knapp's first novel The Names, publishing this month, tells not one story but three. As it opens, a mother is preparing to take her newborn boy to formally register his name. Will it be Bear, as his older sister would like, her own choice of Julian, or Gordon, named after his controlling father? The universe pivots on the decision she makes. Knapp plaits together the three stories that follow to trace the three different worlds in which the boy grows to manhood. Think of it as Sliding Doors for nominative determinism. In this universe, at least, it is going like gangbusters. Described as 'the book of the fair' at Frankfurt two years ago, Knapp's publisher secured the rights in a 13-way auction and it's already due to appear in 20 languages. It is a prime example of a renewed interest in what might be called 'high-concept fiction'. Knapp, though, says that the first time she even heard the epithet was in a meeting with an agent after she'd finished writing her book. 'I looked it up when I came home, and even now, it still feels like a really intangible thing: something to do with a hook, and maybe something to do with structure?' She says she's not a science fiction reader, but her husband is an avid fan and she found herself fascinated when he talked to her about world-building in that genre. The idea for what became The Names first came to her in 2017 or 2018, but 'I'd written a completely different book in between that I thought would have more commercial appeal, and it never found a publisher. So when I was setting out to write this one, I didn't have a sense of it being a big idea at all: it was just the thing that, when I was faced with quite a lot of rejection, I kept coming back to.' The narrative structure was, she says, 'really helpful. I think I realised early on that I wanted to show, in a very crystallised way, those moments in a person's life that are formative. If I hadn't had that structure, it would have been quite amorphous for the reader.' Instead, she says, 'it felt like stepping stones. OK, I just need to get to the next place, and then the next place …' 'High concept' is a tricky notion to define, but you know it when you see it. It's a story with a ready-made elevator pitch; a grabby gimmick in the narrative or world-building that can be summarised in a couple of sentences. Another recent example is last year's hit debut The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: a story about refugees finding their feet in London, but the refugees are from other eras rather than other countries. And probably the hottest piece of translated fiction since Knausgård, Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, announces early on: 'Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November.' Think the classic movie Groundhog Day, or the TV show Russian Doll, in which Natasha Lyonne's character relives her 36th birthday party over and over – only with a Danish antiquarian bookseller and an International Booker shortlisting. There are two accounts you could offer of why these stories are popular now, one of them cynical, one of them less so. There's a bit of truth in both. The cynical one is that high-concept books are much easier to get past marketing meetings. A novel with a gimmick sticks in the mind. Its fanbase can sell it on TikTok – 'it's High School Musical – but with giant crabs!' – and buyers at bookshops will remember that book with the cool premise in the absence of a marquee author name. The less cynical version is that these books find readers because they use their MacGuffins to deft literary effect – and because a public that used to be sniffy about genre fiction is coming to appreciate its imaginative possibilities. The novelist Jenny Colgan describes the increased appetite for high-concept fiction as a sign that readers are 'getting over their prejudices to discover how many amazing worlds there are out there'. As she puts it, 'sci-fi is just shorthand for using certain tropes – time travel, rockets, apocalypse – to tell the kind of story you are telling: a love story, or a story about sadness or loss. And some of those work very well but loads sink without trace.' The vital ingredient, she argues, is quality. 'If you do something brilliantly you can smash through people's genre walls.' The Names is perfectly pitched between so-called literary and popular fiction, full of heart, and works out its premise compellingly. Meanwhile Bradley's book is consistently funny and inventive, and crackles at the level of the sentence: the fun the author is having is contagious. And Balle explores her world absorbingly; the generative idea at the heart of it grips the reader's imagination from the off. The same was true of those high-concept books that broke through in recent years: Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (an alternate-realities precursor to The Names, spliced in with a touch of Groundhog Day); Audrey Niffenegger's time-jumbled romance The Time Traveler's Wife; Naomi Alderman's The Power (what if, overnight, women were a physical threat to men rather than vice versa?) and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, to name just a few. Kaliane Bradley, who is both a publisher (she's an editor at Penguin) and a novelist, says she sees a high-concept pitch as 'an easy way into something that might be more complex or with multiple strands'. She uses the example of Dracula: 'There's a mysterious foreigner, and it's partly about fear of the immigrant, and it's about nervousness around female sexuality … but the high-concept pitch is: 'It's a guy who sucks your blood.'' She thinks the present boom is attributable to a 'certain loosening around the boundaries of genre' which has made people less anxious about approaching a book through a keynote idea: 'There was perhaps a time when people would have been only attracted by that or only put off by it.' She says she wrote her own high-concept novel by accident. 'I thought my first novel would be a big literary book about Cambodia,' she says. The Ministry of Time began as a jeu d'esprit to amuse Bradley's friends, 'and the conceit was: what would it be like if your favourite polar explorer, because we were all very into polar exploration, lived in your house? That's it. That's the concept […] The very first version was almost an experiment, really, and then it turned into a book by mistake.' She adds: 'The difference between this book and the book that I was writing that's now in a bottom drawer, is that one I felt like I had to take very seriously, and I had a real obligation to write. Whereas for this, it was just like: this is a fun idea. What if I just mess around with it? I realise it's different for every writer, but for me, that was just the more fertile way of thinking about writing.' The Names by Florence Knapp is published by Phoenix (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
New Statesman
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Solvej Balle's day without end
Photo by Judit Nilsson / SvD / TT Tara Selter runs an antiquarian books business with her husband, Thomas. They live on the outskirts of a town in northern France, although Tara often travels to book fairs here and there, as she has done – to one in Bordeaux – when her life changes. On her way home she stops in Paris to collect some books for clients. She checks in to a hotel on the evening of 17 November, keeps numerous appointments on the 18th, burns her hand while spending the evening with friends and calls Thomas from her room before going to sleep. But the newspaper she picks up at breakfast the next day is dated the 18th. A simple mistake, she thinks, until someone in the dining room drops a slice of bread and hesitates over what to do with it, just as she watched him do the day before. She checks other newspapers at a kiosk; withdraws cash and studies the receipt; calls her husband, who doesn't remember the previous night's conversation. She still has the burn, but everything else she did on the 18th, including the purchasing of books, which she finds back on the shelves of the shops where she bought them, has been reset. For Tara, the 18th of November is happening again. In fact On the Calculation of Volume begins on Tara's 121st 18 November, which enables her journal entries to recount her outlandish situation with a degree of calmness and clarity (these, as becomes clear, not being the same as acceptance or understanding). By this point she has returned home – while the date resets at some point in the night, physically she remains wherever she has travelled to – and is living secretly in the spare room of her house. She knows each of her husband's movements, when he will go out and return home, when he will make a noise that will mask her own, and so can inhabit the day like a ghost, keeping her journal and working on theories while remaining unseen and unheard. Solvej Balle herself has been largely unseen and unheard since stunning literary Denmark with her 1993 story collection According to the Law. She downplays accounts of reclusiveness, protesting that all she did was leave Copenhagen. But On the Calculation of Volume nevertheless represents an extraordinary late-career success: the first five self-published books (with two to come) became a sensation in Denmark, the first three together winning the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize, and attracting publishers around the world. In the UK Faber & Faber has published the first two books simultaneously (translated by Barbara J Haveland), with the third following in November. The first has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. When we meet Tara she is keeping herself apart, but there was an earlier time when she would tell Thomas, every morning, what had happened to her, convincing him with her uncanny knowledge of the day ahead: ' I could tell him when the rain would stop and when it would start again, I could tell him that the postman would come by at 10.41 during a light shower, I could describe how soon after that a long-tailed titmouse would flit about the branches of the apple tree, and I could predict that at 5.14 in the afternoon, in the pouring rain, our neighbour would hurry past the fence at the bottom of our back garden, turn right and jog down the path between our house and his own.' Together they discuss what has happened, formulate possible solutions, and carry out experiments. But as time goes on, or in Tara's case doesn't, she tires of having to explain things anew each day. She is also disappointed by Thomas's refusal to accompany her to Paris, thinking the door leading out of this loop in time must be located where she entered it. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The first two books of Balle's project achieve a compelling balance of action and thought. Tara thinks a lot but also does while she thinks. As well as being good at this, Balle is also preternaturally gifted at answering questions just as they start to form in a reader's mind. The first that occurs concerns how Tara got from Paris to Clairon-sous-Bois (those indoctrinated by the Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day might expect her to return to the same place each time she wakes). She cannot move in time, but she can move in space. This opens fields of possibility. One of the dominant episodes in the second book involves a scheme to manufacture a year by travelling to different latitudes: following a chance meeting with a meteorologist she travels to Sweden and Norway for winter, Cornwall for spring, southern Spain for summer. If there's a kind of madness to the idea, it's a madness that helps keep her sane. As for all these different climates coexisting on a single autumn day, it's a great advert for the Schengen Area. Another involving subplot concerns what Tara can hang on to versus what disappears when time resets. Through experiment she learns the rules are knowable but not immutable: 'We bought things and left them lying in the kitchen. We opened them or left them unopened. We observed and we kept notes. Usually, the items that we hadn't opened disappeared during the night and went back to where we had bought them. We took things up to the bedroom with us at night, I bought a jar of olives and placed it on the windowsill, I put a toothbrush, unopened and still in its box, under my pillow. The following morning the toothbrush was still there, box and all, but the jar of olives was gone and a packet of tea which Thomas had put in a kitchen cabinet had also vanished.' Tara adapts her behaviours as she becomes more familiar with what is and isn't possible. If she wants to keep a new dress she must wear it immediately, with nothing underneath, to 'train' it to stay with her. She also learns that the food she consumes stays consumed. If she goes to a café and orders the same dish several days in a row, eventually that dish disappears from the menu. She finds this fact deeply disturbing. It makes her 'a monster in a finite world'. One of the most impressive things about Balle's project is the care she has taken in thinking about Tara's predicament both practically and philosophically, and the sedulousness with which she explores it. The book Thomas is (repeatedly) reading in Clairon-sous-Bois is called Lucid Investigations, the title of which works for Balle's novel, too: even when the logic becomes head-spinning, the prose maintains its methodical, elegant pace. And while individuals might differ from Tara in their priorities (I imagine some would consider a fling earlier than day 578), her situation says something universal and profound about loneliness and depression, as well as the monotony that characterises certain stretches of our lives. By the close of book two, three years have passed and Tara is in Düsseldorf, where she seems to have a pretty nice time. She squats in an old architect's studio, spends days reading in cafés, watches a local football team win promotion (actually impossible in Germany in November) and attends university lectures. She knows she is privileged, 'that my cage is gilded', but on the final page its bars are rattled: the next 18 November, it seems, will be very different from the last. On the Calculation of Volume Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland Faber & Faber, 192pp, £12.99 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: The second birth of JMW Turner] Related This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall
