Christine Smallwood at Bookforum:
ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME is a series of seven novels by the Danish writer Solvej Balle that imagines a world in which one November day repeats indefinitely. Six volumes have so far been published in Denmark; in the United States, Volume IV is the newest to be available, in a translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. The books are structured as the occasional journal of Tara Setler, a rare-books dealer. Volume I covered the first three hundred and sixty-six repetitions of the day; by the end of Volume IV, ten years have passed, and Tara is not any closer to understanding what is happening, or why. But asking “why” progressive time has broken would be asking the wrong question. Balle is not interested in the physics of space-time, but in a structure of feeling. The novels drift, skirting the existential terror inherent in their premise. In lieu of conflict, they offer the reader an anesthetized lyricism, an elegy for a world that, because it holds still, can at last be seen and heard and described—like an exhibition in a museum, or a body preserved in formaldehyde.
more here.
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