Book II of Solvej Balle's seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language.
Thrilling ... The time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions ... Doesn’t present the time loop solely as a problem to be solved but as a condition of being alive. Who hasn’t walked through a day oblivious to the fact that it’s the beginning or the end of a certain type of day?
At once scrupulously realistic and intriguingly speculative. Balle succeeds in conveying the texture of Tara’s changing feelings, her shifting moods ... There are flashes of allegorical designs here, but in the main the novel’s propulsive imaginative brilliance lies in Tara’s metaphoric search for a language with which to communicate the sheer incomprehensibility of her condition.
It is a marvel that these short books contain so much—so many ways of measuring time and its effects, meditations on consumption and destruction, the quantum mechanics of love, the persistence of history and memory, the strange behavior of things in the world, how details appear at molecular and cosmic levels. But overall this is a work about writing, an act that is dependent, of course, on time.
