On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle
In Solvej Balle's beautiful mediation on love and loneliness, a woman comes unstuck in time and repeats the same day on loop
Growth, transition, death: love conquers everything except, perhaps, for the fact of time – the last immoveable frontier between two people. In Danish writer Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I), this insurmountable divide is literalised through Tara, a woman who slips through the cracks of time and is forced to live out the same day again and again alongside her husband who continues to move linearly forward. Balle transforms the classic time loop narrative structure from its traditionally speculative or comedic proportions into something more lyrical and existentially wracked: a mediation on the ways we come to be separated, ultimately, from those we love, the impossibility of ever bridging the gap between two different subjectivities, the ways in which love is so often never enough.
Her prose, translated masterfully by Barbara J. Haveland, is filled with yearning and heartbreak precisely because it is so crisp and matter-of-fact, as Tara comes to understand the limits of herself within the world, and the loneliness that this brings. Paying attentive detail to mundane, everyday moments and actions, Balle makes a case for the components of our lives being formed by these small things, that keep us tethered to the present and propel us forward to the future, either together or apart. “We were living in two different times. That was all,” Tara says. Time loop or not, On the Calculation of Volume argues that this is true of us all.
