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
