On the Calculation of Volume, Book II

By: Solvej Balle

Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang

Tara Selter’s epic journey through November 18th continues in Book II of the masterly On the Calculation of Volume from one of Scandinavia’s most beloved writers.

The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth.

Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully 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.

And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara’s own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? “It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.” She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, without a purpose or a place.

Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion—taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages—a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.

©2020, 2024 Solvej Balle, Barbara J. Haveland (P)2025 New Directions Publishing Corp.

Story loses momentum in Book II

I was very disappointed. This is the second installment of what will be a seven-volume collection and it largely feels like filler. Nothing happens in this book that provides greater insight into Tara's problem; she remains stuck in Nov. 18th. There's also no character development. I feel I still know very little about Tara's personality, the kind of person she is.
In this book, Tara copes with her dilemma with travel. Despite being stuck in Nov. 18th, she travels to areas with different climates to recreate the feeling of seasons. In the midst of travel, she interacts with many other people, none of whom are developed and all exist solely as stock characters. The book is very heavy on details: descriptions of where and how Tara travels. My attention frequently wandered while listening, because I very soon realized that this book was in no way advancing the plot. Tara and the reader/listener are still as clueless as ever as to why this is happening.
The narrator's very bland delivery makes things worse. Perhaps, if the narrator had injected a bit of feeling, the story would have been more compelling.
I'm not sure I will stick with this series through the final volume.