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Winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize, in the original and for Volume I-III
And in translation:
Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize
Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature

My name is Tara Selter. I am sitting in the back room overlooking the garden and a woodpile. It is the eighteenth of November. 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. I no longer expect to wake up to the nineteenth of November and I no longer remember the seventeenth of November as if it were yesterday.

On the Calculation of Volume I is Barbara J. Haveland's translation of Om udregning af rumfang #1 by Solvej Balle.

As the name suggests this is just the first instalment of a longer novel, to be published in 7 volumes, five of which have appeared in the Danish original, with this and the second Volume to be published on the same day in the UK in April 2025 (I read the US version, which was published last year). I'm a little surprised/disappointed that the International Booker judges didn't take the braver decision to nominate both Volume I and II together as one choice in the same way that the Nordic Council did.

The basic premise of the book is like that of Groundhog Day - although the author has said in an that she had the idea in 1987, and didn't watch the movie for sometime: "when I finally saw it, I realised, ah, that’s a lot of nice research for my idea, because I realised it was so different."

The novel is told from the perspective of Tara Selter, living in 'a two-story stone cottage on the outskirts of the town of Clairon-sous-Bois in northern France' with her husband Thomas, who she first met 5 years ago, both antiquarian book-dealers specialising in illustrated works from the eighteenth century.

I am the one who travels to auctions and visits antiquarian bookshops while Thomas takes care of cataloging and shipping. To begin with we did everything together, but we have gradually split the responsibilities between us. I’m not sure why it fell to me to do the traveling. Maybe because I don’t mind traveling so much and maybe because I very quickly developed a certain instinct for the books, a feel for the paper, an eye for the quality of the printing, for a well-crafted binding. I don’t know what it is, but it’s almost physical, like an inchworm testing whether a leaf is worth creeping across, or a bird listening to insects moving in the bark of a tree. It might be a detail: the sound when you flick through the pages, the feel of the lettering, the depth of the imprint, the saturation of the colors in an illustration, the precision of the details in a plate, the hues of the edges.

But Tara is locked into a repetition of the 18th November. As the novel opens she tells us I have counted the days and if my calculations are correct today is the eighteenth of November #121 ... That is why I began to write. ... Because time has fallen apart. Because I found a ream of paper on the shelf. Because I’m trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.

The novel consists of a series of journal entries which Tara makes to document her experiences, over the first year and a day of her experience, starting on that 121st day, the first entries necessarily rather backward-looking and with lengthy explanations of her stories, but the later entries sporadic and sometimes quite brief.

We learn early on that Tara's first November 18th took place on a trip, via a book fair in Bordeaux, to Paris, where she was to spend the nights of November 17th and 18th, visiting book shops in search of certain works as well as seeeing her friend, Philip Maurel, at his antique coin shop, specialising in Roman coins (which, I believe, becomes more significant in later volumes). The only real incident of note that day is that, while spending the evening with Philip and his girlfriend Marie, she burns her hand on a heater:

I let out a cry, an expletive probably. Marie came over and managed to move the heater while I stood there, paralyzed by the pain for a moment. Having deposited our plates in the kitchen Philip promptly reappeared with a bowl of cold water into which I plunged my hand, and for the rest of the evening I sat like that, with my hand immersed in a bowl of water, although this did nothing to ease the pain. That was the only unusual thing to happen that night.

Tara's hand immersed in water is a link to Archimedes 'Eureka' moment, and gives the series its title, the author noting "however, she has to take a long journey towards understanding, while Archimedes only had to submerge himself for a moment to gain insight into how to calculate volume" (from an ), although Balle herself seems unclear if this was or was not a crucial moment, and indeed one of the interesting things in this Volume, and the work generally, is the sense of a writer working through the implications of their ideas, alongside Tara, as each writes.

But when she wakes the next morning it is November 18th again, as she realised at the hotel breakfast, first noticing that the newspapers are the ones she read yesterday: It was only when one of the hotel’s other guests dropped a piece of bread on the floor that I began to worry. Not because I don’t know that this sort of thing happens again and again in hotels all over the world, but because the same guest had dropped a piece of bread at that same spot the day before.

Unlike Groundhog Day, Tara is free to escape the confines of Paris, and, crucially she doesn't start each day physically renewed, her burn healing rather than disappearing, even though she doesn't reenact the accident: This is the 121st time I have lived through the eighteenth of November and the burn is still visible as a slender scar on my hand. It started out as an angry, puffy weal. This soon began to weep, then a long, brownish scab formed over it. Little by little the scab loosened and fell off, leaving a shiny pink mark.

Her initial reaction on that first repeated day is to call Thomas, explain what had happened, and, both rather confused, return to him and their house in Clairon-sous-Bois. But when they both wake the next morning, it is November 18th again, and he has no memory of their conversation and indeed can't understand how she can be there given she was in Paris on the night of the 17th.

He didn’t doubt that I was telling the truth. He had spoken to me and had forgotten it. That was what scared him. It was one thing for me to have encountered a fracture in the normal progression of time, but the idea that he had played a part in my day and that he had had conversations and done things he could not remember obviously gave him the same feelings of faintness and unease which I had had when I saw that slice of bread drifting floorward. That strange moment when the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered, a quiet state of panic which prompts neither flight nor cries for help, and does not call for police, fire brigade or ambulance ... that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.

[which is an aside, is rather how most of us are feeling about the world in the new US administration]

At first, she starts each day explaining her predicament to Thomas (who doesn't doubt her, and who she is easily able in any case to convince with predictions of certain external events such as a neighbour passing by) and the two try to work through the implications of what has happened, and is happening, although only she retains memories of where they had got to in their thinking in previous days.

We could not find the mistake. We could not find the reason why time had fallen apart. There was no reason. I could not find a reason, Thomas could not find a reason. We could find patterns and we could find inconsistencies. Thomas was the pattern, I was disturbance.

We devised theories and frameworks which we compared to the events of the eighteenth of November. We debated perceptions of reality and mental dysfunctions, we considered whether I might be generating trains of fictional experiences or whether everyone else had been struck by some form of amnesia, or whether we had stepped into a wave of psychological incongruence. We propounded theories and mounted counterarguments. We read about parataxic views of time and variable chronometry, we unearthed descriptions of fractures in time and chronotoxic recurrence. We explored theories on parallel universes, multiple worlds and relative temporal structures. We found stories of the morphology of memory and of rare cases of amnesiac chronopathy. We discussed theories of repetition and mnemonic defects. We studied mental processes, the objects of the world, temporal sequences. We collected theories and explanations. Actually, though, we had no shortage of explanations, we had plenty of those, but explanations which could stand up to critical scrutiny and at the same time embody all our many observations, those we could not find.

And meanwhile she tries to prolong that sense of waking each morning, unsure if it really is November 18th

I don’t think it was an act of will, but slowly and almost imperceptibly I managed to extend my sense of neutral, indefinite morning. I concentrated it, intensified that pale-gray awakening and with each morning I found it possible to carry that sensation with me further into the day. After only a few mornings I could hold onto the moment long enough for it to encompass everything in the room around me: the bed linens and Thomas’s body beside me, the wall behind the bed and the wardrobe on the other side of the room, a chair with clothes on it, the morning light, the faint sound of a chimney flue door rattling in the wind. These are familiar sounds and sensations and it is still an ordinary morning, it is spacious and open, and I lie in bed while fragments of the world drift in and dissolve: a brief riff of birdsong, a blackbird defying the gray skies or a robin singing into a pause in the rain, three or four notes to start with, then six or seven, then eight, and each one as it burst forth dissolving in my fog.

But as time goes on, around the 76th day, she realises this is getting nowhere - "I stood in the kitchen with the notebook in my hand and knew that too many days had come between us" - and starts to withdraw, moving to a spare room, and trying to conceal her presence from Philip, observing but not interacting with him, as he goes about his daily routine, one which, of course, never varies.

She also develops their theory that "Thomas was the pattern, I was disturbance" to another "Thomas is the ghost and I am the monster", as she realises that while his actions leave no trace on the day (food he eats is there to be eaten the next day), that's not true of her own actions, realising that the local supermarket is gradually becoming depleted.

And as the 366th day approaches - the day that had time progressed normally would be, once again, November 18th of the following year - she decides to return to Paris and Philip's shop, reasoning that she may be able to break out of the cycle somehow. But given this is Volume I of VII it doesn't need a spoiler alert to say things don't work out that way.

This isn't a novel for those looking for science-fiction like explanations of what may have happened, but what distinguishes it is the wonderful prose, in Haveland's exceptional translation, and, as mentioned previously the sense of an author working through her ideas - on his Substack, appositely describes the novel as "Groundhog Day written by Rachel Cusk."

It's something of a frustating choice for a prize list, as this does feel like part of a larger work, rather than a whole, but still a fascinating choice, and this passes the test that I immediately wanted to read Volume II.

The judges' take

On the Calculation of Volume I takes a potentially familiar narrative trope � a protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day � and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist, to want to be alive, to need to share one’s time with others. The sheer quality of the sentences was what struck us most, rendered into English with deft, invisible musicality by the translator. This book presses its mood, its singular time signature and its philosophical depth into the reader. You feel you are in it, which is sometimes unnerving, sometimes soothing, and this effect lingers long after the book is finished.